LAUSR

“Ask a new question, and you will learn new things.” Cachexia is not a new clinical problem. More than two centuries ago, the Greek physician Hippocrates detailed the relationship between cachexia and chronic heart failure, noting that: “The flesh is consumed and becomes water the abdomen fills with water, the feet and legs swell, the shoulders, clavicles, chest, and thighs melt away this illness is fatal.” Today, we appreciate that cachexia is also a common clinical feature in people living with renal failure, infectious disease, and cancer. Important work has been conducted to help us better understand the complicated landscape that is cancer cachexia. Experts have labored to develop a consensus definition to capture its salient features. Research is being conducted to understand its precise etiology. Efforts to identify the currently limited pharmacological and nutritional support interventions to help mitigate the ongoing loss of lean muscle mass in advanced disease continues. However, there is still more that we need to understand. We need to ask new questions to learn new things about this vexing clinical problem. This special issue about cancer cachexia helps to advance that imperative. It consists of four papers whose authors have posed salient questions that have enabled us learn new things about a not so new problem. Dr. Jane Hopkinson asks what we know about the experiences and self‐management of eating problems in people receiving cancer treatment. Her scoping review about eating problems patients experience during radiotherapy and systemic anticancer treatment is very instructive – both in what it affirms about our knowledge of cancer cachexia syndrome, and the direction, it provides for future research needed to examine eating problems across all cancer sites, patients’ perspectives on self‐management of their nutritional care,