TNF and nutritional deficiency disease: When we compared findings of routine blood parameters in CP patients with different stages of malnutrition including C-reactive protein (CRP), interleukins 6 and 1β as well as tumor necrosis factor α (Table 4), we found that only two routine parameters significantly differed between malnourished and non-malnourished patients: While mean corpuscular volume was higher in malnourished patients, levels of cholinesterase were reduced (p = 0.026 and p < 0.001, respectively).