Pneumonia and cachexia?

Question

Why are people with pneumonia at risk for cachexia?

Answer 1

People with pneumonia have higher caloric requirements due to increased efforts required for breathing and more energy needed to fight infections and to heal. Also, people with pneumonia may find eating more difficult, so they just don't eat much. When someone is sick and can't breathe, eating is the last thing on their mind. The combination of all this leads to the general wasting and poor state known as cachexia.

When my daughter first got sick with a lung disease as a little baby, she lost 1/3 of her body weight! They called it "failure to thrive" at first (slap in the mother's face diagnosis if you ask me!), but they soon realized that the problem was that she was using up all the energy she was taking into her system on breathing. She eventually suffered respiratory failure and had to go onto a ventilator for a few weeks, but once they started high doses of steroids to reduce some of her inflammation, she got off of that. She is still trying to heal from the lung damage and has been on oxygen and the steroids ever since, but she is now growing and developing quite normally. We have been told that the supplemental oxygen is helping her maintain her growth because she is no longer burning up all her calories trying to breathe.

I am not a doctor, so if I left stuff out, sorry. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

What an elegant lay explanation of the condition above. Give that one best answer status.