Cachexia
/kəˈkɛksɪə/noun
The wasting of muscle and fat that accompanies advanced cancer, heart failure and other chronic illness, and which feeding alone does not reverse.
The Greek roots
Literally: “bad condition”
The story of the word
Hippocratic writers already used κακεξία for a generally ruined bodily state. The modern meaning is sharper and grimmer: this is not starvation but a metabolic process driven by the illness, which is why extra calories fail to fix it and why cachexia is thought to cause a substantial share of cancer deaths directly. Its Greek opposite, εὐεξία, good condition, never made it into English medicine, though the κακός half is loud in cacophony.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 16th century
Same family
In a sentence
Cachexia had taken a third of his body weight before the diagnosis.
Treating cachexia means treating the inflammation, not just the appetite.