Nutrition and cancer: Some practical approaches to management

Much has been written about nutrition and cancer, and much has been written about cancer in the elderly. However, the overlap of all three of these subjects-nutrition, cancer, and the elderly-yields a dearth of publications. In considering this convergence of subjects, three points become apparent. First, malnutrition and its association with poor outcomes is a foregone conclusion among older cancer patients, as it is among their younger counterparts. For example, Fukuse and others described postoperative complications in a cohort of 120 thoracic surgery patients, many of whom had had lung cancer.1 Evidence of malnutrition was associated with a sevenfold increase in air leaks (p = 0.045), which were presumably a consequence of healing impairments related to nutritional compromise. Although this study provided no comparative data from a younger cohort, it nonetheless makes the point that older cancer patients do definitely suffer morbidity in the setting of malnutrition, and that focusing upon and understanding the implications of malnutrition even among older cancer patients is a worthwhile pursuit.