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ScienceDaily reports that:
Many patients with advanced stages of cancer, AIDS, tuberculosis, and other diseases die from a condition called cachexia, which is characterized as a "wasting" syndrome that causes extreme thinness with muscle weakness. Cachexia is the direct cause of roughly 20% of deaths in cancer patients. While boosting food intake doesn't help, and no effective therapies are available, new research in the Cell Press journal Cell Metabolism points to a promising strategy that may stimulate weight gain and muscle strength.
The research relates to a process that has been gaining considerable attention as a way to combat obesity: the browning of white fat. While white fat normally stores calories, brown fat burns them and generates heat in the process. Therefore, efforts to turn white fat into brown fat may help people lose weight.
Erwin Wagner, of the Spanish National Cancer Research Centre in Madrid, and his colleagues found that in mice and patients with cancer-associated cachexia, white fat undergoes significant changes and turns into calorie-burning brown fat. The transformation leads to increased energy consumption and organ wasting.
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Wednesday July 23 2014, @09:11AM
The summary does state that a certain percentage of cancer deaths are the result of the accompanying cachexia rather than the cancer itself, so I think longevity would improve with it.
As for increased quality of life, I could be wrong, but it seems to me that somebody with an adequate amount of muscle shouldn't be as quick to become fatigued and should be able to do more things on their own or with minimal help. Having their body mass increase so they're no longer underweight should also mean they won't have the unpleasant sensation that they're cold all the time.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday July 23 2014, @07:28PM
Sorry, but the sensation of being cold isn't closely tied to normal body mass. OTOH, the sensation of being cold all the time is quite likely to CAUSE the conversion of normal fat into beige fat. One known way of doing this is to spend a lot of time in a cold room.
I suspect that you have a causal link inverted...that it's the sensation of being cold that causes the browning of their fats. It possibly also causes persistent shivering, in which case it could be that their muscles just wear out from continuous overwork. (I've never known anyone in that state, so this is just ungrounded speculation.) Certainly muscles seem to wear out as you get older. Up to a point exercise causes them to become stronger, but when past that point it causes them to weaken. This also happens under some other extreme stress situations, such as starvation. Perhaps continual shivering has the same effect.
It is quite unfortunate, given the above argument, that the sensation of cold isn't necessarily relieved by an external (or internal) temperature in the range optimum for health.
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