One of the things that alerted my doctor to the fact that something might be wrong was my rapid weight loss.  Though my doctor at that time did not run the right test to detect the cause, he was aware that something was going wrong.  The first suspicion is cancer, and I am thankful that cancer was not the diagnosis.  He did find that I had iron deficiency anemia, or at least that is what he diagnosed and put me on slow-release iron tablets.  From a previous post, you may detect that this diagnosis was probably not the right one either.  At any rate I got over being so tired and gained some of my weight back.

I have since been made aware of a condition called wasting.  This is what weight loss with COPD is usually called.  I will research the possibility that wasting and anorexia are one and the same when it comes to COPD.  According to a study published by the National Institute of Health (NIH), COPD can lead to a drastic reduction in weight and may lead to a dangerous comorbidity called cachexia. 

“Cachexia is a condition wherein the person losses weight and muscle atrophy or decrease in the muscle mass of someone who did not try to lose weight. This is also called a wasting syndrome. This condition could not, however, be reversed through nutrition alone because even if the patient eats more than the required dietary needs, there is still a loss of body mass which means there is an underlying cause to the problem.”  This is a quote taken from https://healthline.com

I returned to Anorexia in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease–association to cachexia and hormonal derangement – PubMed (nih.gov) and read several other articles.  The ‘brain-muscle axis’ coordinated by the hypothalamus seems to mediate the onset of not only anorexia but also tissue wasting in cachexia, by centrally influencing energy homeostasis and the balance between anabolism and catabolism.  This information gets into the weeds rather quickly as you can see.  This information comes from an article entitled Contribution of anorexia to tissue wasting in cachexia.

A quick lesson here is that metabolism has 2 phases the building up phase or anabolism and the tearing down phase called catabolism.  When we eat something, our bodies change this food into molecules that can be used for energy.  The act of the body forming these molecules is referred to as anabolism.  The body then tears down these molecules to release the energy that was stored in them, and this is called catabolism.  On the cellular level, this is reduced to the production of a molecule called adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and the release of one of the phosphate molecules to form adenosine diphosphate (ADP).  ADP can also lose a molecule of phosphate to form adenosine monophosphate (AMP).  The building phase is the process in reverse.

For a narrated graphic characterization of this process, you may want to visit Energy Metabolism – Part 1: Body’s Sources of Energy – Bing video

We seem to be back to the same place that we found ourselves in the discussion of arthritis.  More than likely the wasting is caused by the action of hormones that are active in the process of inflammation.  I also find that the simplification that I made about this not being anorexia, but just wasting is also oversimplified and the problem is much more complex.