How Important Is Nutritional Health to Mesothelioma Treatment?

Nutrition itself for mesothelioma is one of the under under utilized, under studied, less known factors that we see because in the majority, in fact, more than ninety five percent of my patients with mesothelioma. Besides the shortness of breath and some of the chest pain, really every single family member or every single patient just like, yeah, I've been losing weight. Why am I losing weight? It's not a cancer in the in the in the GI tract. Right? They're they it's not a tumor affecting their esophagus. This is in the plural lining. Something about mesothelioma, and it hasn't it's been studied a little bit, but one, the the there's proteins that we think that are secreted by mesothelioma that are more active in causing weight loss than other cancers per se. But number two, patients just don't feel well and they're so fatigued that they don't wanna eat because if you're short breath and out of breath and in pain, you're not gonna wanna eat. And so that's probably the more common. And so nutrition is so important because most mesothelioma patients are not gonna weigh three hundred four hundred pounds. They're usually gonna be in the low one hundreds and very, you know, very thin. And so the idea behind getting nutrition involved early even before we start our multimodality treatment program is important. We will, a hundred percent of the time now, recommend a nutritionist prior to any type of treatment to assess, you know, how much protein they need, how much calories they need. And we do think that that's important because most of the mesothelioma patients present with very, poor appetite, poor nutrition, and weight loss. So I think to even get treatment, you have to get the medical, surgical, immunotherapy, radiation treatment. You have to have some type of nutrition program, involved in that.