What Roles Do Nutrition and Physical Activity Play in Mesothelioma Treatment?

Mainly because the surgery itself is such a big surgery that patients, in order to recover and get the benefit from a multimodality approach of surgery and chemotherapy, you need to be somewhat fit enough to do that. And that just means normal walking. So two things, they need exercise, but the exercise doesn't have to be intense. Patients will ask me, well, do you need me to go to the gym? No. They just need to walk. Twenty, thirty minutes a day, a walk. Not just walking the dog, like not stopping every time, but doing a nice brisk walk. Doesn't have to be a power walk. Right? But doing that, so that'll keep the endurance up with the lung the lung strength almost like training for a marathon because we're gonna put you through a lot through surgery and chemo. But then the chemo part and the mesothelioma part causes you to not eat as much, causes weight loss, and causes protein breakdown. So the second part on top of the exercise that's really crucial and we really make a point to make sure patients are, you know, drinking their protein drinks, drinking their shakes, whether it be Boost, Ensure, Muscle Milk, Organ, Protein. Protein is specifically related to, outcomes. And so we know that patients that have better nutrition, better specifically protein levels, they could be losing weight, but if their protein levels, such as their albumin and pre albumin are actually relatively okay, we know that even though they're losing twenty, thirty pounds, that they can withstand a surgery and that they can withstand chemotherapy and they can do well. So I do check we do check for that, to see, one, how their endurance is. Do they walk? You know, can they are they coming in with a wheelchair? If they're coming in with a wheelchair, they're probably not well enough at this point to endure such treatment. So those patients may not be the greatest candidates for mesothelioma multi modality approach. And then, so at the same time with the nutrition, you don't just go by weight loss, you actually have to go by their protein levels and we will specifically look at that during the evaluation period to see whether or not they need to be bulked up first, Do they need to go on an intensive nutrition program, or are they pretty much ready to go and start their treatment whether it be surgery or chemotherapy or immunotherapy. So, those two things I think are highly important because those are directly related to how they're gonna do after surgery and how they're gonna recover and then ultimately what their prognosis is gonna be. So the more more fit they are, a little bit more healthy they are, a little bit more weight that they have already going into things, they're gonna do better, and we think that it's gonna improve their survival after these treatments.