Purpose: The average weight-losing pancreatic cancer patient undergoing palliative therapy
is frequently overweight rather than underweight, and this can confound conventional
measures used for risk stratification. The aim of this study was to evaluate if weight and body
composition, specifically sarcopenia, assessed from diagnostic computed tomography (CT)
scans, is of prognostic value in patients with pancreatic cancer. The nature and extent of
tissue loss over subsequent months was also evaluated. Experimental Design: A total of 111 …

Results The median age at diagnosis was 68. One hundred forty-seven (75%) patients were
sarcopenic, 91 patients were overweight/obese (45.7%) and 64 patients (32.6%) were both.
Sarcopenic patients were much older than non-sarcopenic patients (p= 0.003). Sarcopenia
alone does not correlate with survival, but sarcopenic and obese patients have worse OS
compared to sarcopenic non-obese patients (p= 0.01). There was no correlation between
OS and VFA. However, patients with low VFA/SFA ratio had significantly better OS than …