%0 Journal Article
%T Treating cancer cachexia to treat cancer
%A Se-Jin Lee
%A David J Glass
%J Skeletal Muscle
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/2044-5040-1-2
%X Loss of skeletal muscle mass can occur in a wide range of disease states and has significant consequences, causing debilitating weakness and also metabolic dysfunction - as skeletal muscle is one of the major tissues in the body responsible for regulating energy availability and energy expenditure. Loss of muscle mass can result either from primary muscle degenerative diseases, such as the muscular dystrophies, or as a secondary consequence of cachectic disease processes also affecting other tissues, such as cancer, burns, renal failure, sepsis and congestive heart failure (for review, see [1]). In the latter class of conditions, muscle wasting is seen in many patients with various distinct types of cancer. In fact, unexplained weight loss and fatigue are often the presenting symptoms that bring cancer patients to the doctor's office. Moreover, this wasting process, or cachexia, has been cited as a major cause of actual mortality in patients with cancer. The aetiology of cachexia has remained largely mysterious, although several cytokines, including tumour necrosis factor-¦Á, interleukin-6 and interleukin-1¦Â, have been implicated as playing a role in mediating the wasting process. One of the hallmarks of cachexia is that the loss of lean body mass cannot be prevented or reversed simply by increasing nutritional intake. Therefore, there has been considerable focus on developing anabolic strategies that directly target muscle in order to preserve muscle mass and function. Two recent papers by Benny-Klimek et al. [2] and Zhou et al. [3] have reported studies that investigated the potential beneficial effects of targeting the myostatin/activin signalling pathway in order to provide such an anabolic stimulus to muscle in rodent models of cancer cachexia.Myostatin (MSTN) is a transforming growth factor-¦Â (TGF-¦Â) family member that normally acts to limit muscle mass (for review, see [4]). Mutations in the Mstn gene have been shown to result in dramatic increases in muscle m
%U http://www.skeletalmusclejournal.com/content/1/1/2