ALB and malnutrition: While albumin production could be increased in the early stages of exposure to harmful insults like carcinogens, albumin production is significantly decreased in advanced cancer due to malnutrition and the inhibitory pressure of cytokines and chemokines, like C-reactive protein and interleukin-6 on the liver (Gupta and Lis, 2010; Svaton et al., 2018; Guo et al., 2022).