Treatment of Cachexia With Ghrelin in Patients With COPD

Effect of acute and regular exercise on growth hormone secretagogue receptor-1a expression in human lymphocytes, T cell subpopulation and monocytes

“…Ghrelin expression by T cells is also reduced in ageing mice and ghrelin infusion in this model has been shown to reduce levels of IL-6, TNF-α and IL-1β (Dixit et al, 2009). Ghrelin infusion to improve lean body mass and appetite and decrease circulating inflammatory cytokines has had positive outcomes in patient populations with inflammation-related cachexia including cachetic cancer, cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and chronic kidney disease (DeBoer, 2011;DeBoer et al, 2008;Nagaya et al, 2004Nagaya et al, , 2005Strasser et al, 2008). Our finding of increased GHS-R1a availability after exercise and a higher circulating proportion and concentration of GHS-R1a+ lymphocytes in active compared with sedentary individuals suggests that exercise prescription should be explored further as a tool to enhance the effectiveness of ghrelin therapy.…”

Safety, tolerability and pharmacokinetics of intravenous ghrelin for cancer-related anorexia/cachexia: a randomised, placebo-controlled, double-blind, double-crossover study

“…The hepatic GH effector IGF-1 levels are not correspondingly increased in conditions with high endogenous plasma ghrelin levels, such as ghrelin-producing tumours (Corbetta et al, 2003;Tsolakis et al, 2004). Furthermore, the administration of ghrelin does not significantly affect the IGF-1 level in healthy volunteers (Enomoto et al, 2003), patients with cardiovascular (Nagaya et al, 2004) or pulmonary diseases (Nagaya et al, 2005), tumour-bearing animals (DeBoer et al, 2007), or our patients with CACS. In contrast, studies using synthetic oral ghrelin mimetics have shown a significant effect on the IGF-1 level in volunteers and in the frail elderly (Smith, 2005) or patients with cancer cachexia (Garcia et al, 2007).…”

“…ghrelin (single-dose bolus, daily for 3 weeks, or i.v. infusion) were reported in patients with chronic heart failure (Nagaya et al, 2001b(Nagaya et al, , 2004, COPD (Nagaya et al, 2005), or diabetic gastroparesis .…”

Ghrelin Gene Products in Acute and Chronic Inflammation

“…In addition, in both human patients and experimental animal models, ghrelin administration ameliorates the cachectic state associated with several pathological conditions-such as chronic heart failure , chronic kidney disease (DeBoer et al 2008), cancer (Argilés andStemmler 2013;Neary et al 2004;DeBoer et al 2007), burn injuries (Balasubramaniam et al 2006), and COPD (Nagaya et al 2005)-likely through activity on both the immune system and the skeletal muscle (Reano et al 2014).…”