Practical cancer cachexia management in palliative care - a review of current evidence.

Purpose Of Review: To explore the current evidence relating to the practical management of cancer cachexia in palliative care.

Recent Findings: The authors found a growing evidence base including the publication of several expert guidelines since 2020. Guidelines identified the need for individualised nutritional and physical exercise support as the mainstay of cachexia management.

Mechanical Contact Spectroscopy: Characterizing Nanoscale Adhesive Contacts via Thermal Forces.

The adhesion of micro- and nanoparticles to solid substrates immersed in liquids is a problem of great scientific and technological importance. However, the quantitative characterization of such nanoscale adhesive contacts without rupturing them still presents a major experimental challenge. In this article, we introduce mechanical contact spectroscopy (MCS), an experimental technique for the nondestructive probing of particle adhesion in liquid environments.

Nanoscopic imaging of thick heterogeneous soft-matter structures in aqueous solution.

Precise nanometre-scale imaging of soft structures at room temperature poses a major challenge to any type of microscopy because fast thermal fluctuations lead to significant motion blur if the position of the structure is measured with insufficient bandwidth. Moreover, precise localization is also affected by optical heterogeneities, which lead to deformations in the imaged local geometry, the severity depending on the sample and its thickness. Here we introduce quantitative thermal noise imaging, a three-dimensional scanning probe technique, as a method for imaging soft, optically heterogeneous and porous matter with submicroscopic spatial resolution in aqueous solution.

Detecting sequential bond formation using three-dimensional thermal fluctuation analysis.

We present a novel experimental method that solves two key problems in nondestructive mechanical studies of small biomolecules at the single-molecule level, namely the confirmation of single-molecule conditions and the discrimination against nonspecific binding. A biotin-avidin ligand-receptor couple is spanned between a glass slide and a 1 microm latex particle using short linker molecules. Optical tweezers are used to initiate bond formation and to follow the particle's thermal position fluctuations with nanometer spatial and microsecond temporal resolution.