Abstracts of the 2^nd Cancer Cachexia Conference, Montreal, Canada, 26–28 September 2014

Cancer cachexia contributes to poor prognosis through progressive depletion of the body's energy and protein reserves; research is revealing the impact of the quantitly of these reserves on survival. Our group has exploitated computed tomography (CT) images to study body composition in cancer patients. We argue that CT taken for the purposes of diagnosis and routine follow-up can be used to derive clinically useful information on skeletal muscle and fat amount and distribution. Population-based data sets have been analyzed, revealing wide variation in individual proportions of fat and muscle (Prado et al.