TNF and nutritional deficiency disease: In CKD patients, increased expression of TNF-α and IL-6 is detected in skeletal muscle (Zhang et al., 2020), and cachexia is accompanied by increases in circulating TNF-α and IL-6 in addition to CRP (Stenvinkel et al., 2005), which often occur in the presence of malnutrition, and therefore is referred to as malnutrition-inflammation-cachexia syndrome (Kalantar-Zadeh, 2005).