IL6 and cancer: This phenomenon was also apparent when correlating weight loss and cytokine levels in BMI- and weight loss matched patient groups with healthy, cachectic, and non-cachectic patients with cancer: a significant positive correlation between circulating cytokine levels (IL6, IL1β, IL10) and body weight loss was observed only in the young patient population (≤55 years) (Table 2), although weight loss was comparable between groups (see patient characteristics in Table 3).