China’s CACA Guidelines Redefine Cancer Care With Holistic Integrative Assessment

A sweeping new guideline published in the journal Holistic Integrative Oncology is challenging one of the deepest assumptions in modern cancer medicine: that a tumor is the disease. The 2025 CACA Guidelines for holistic integrative assessment, issued under the auspices of the China Anti-Cancer Association, argue that safe and effective anticancer therapy is impossible without first evaluating the whole person—body, mind, family, finances, genes, and even fertility. The document, authored by a large multidisciplinary consortium led by Hongyan Zhang and Qiuling Shi, is being described as the first global guideline to systematically delineate pre-therapy evaluation, and its implications reach far beyond China’s borders.

The guideline rests on a simple but radical premise. Malignant tumors are so complex and heterogeneous that a disease-centric model of care is no longer sufficient; instead, clinicians must adopt a patient-centric paradigm built on what the authors call cancer holistic integrative assessment, or CHIA. CHIA is characterized by four core principles: an integrative philosophy that treats the patient as a whole, multidimensional evaluation spanning clinical history to molecular biology, a dynamic and individualized process that is repeated throughout the disease course, and multidisciplinary collaboration among oncologists, psycho-oncologists, nutritionists, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, and reproductive medicine specialists. Assessment, in this framework, is both a diagnostic procedure and a strategy to preemptively avoid treatment-induced injury.

The intellectual lineage of the guideline traces back to the mid-twentieth century, when tumor assessment focused almost exclusively on tumor size and morphology, exemplified by the 1979 WHO criteria for solid tumor response. The introduction of RECIST 1.0 in 2000 by the EORTC, U.S. NCI, and NCIC provided a simplified, reproducible measurement method, and the arrival of targeted and immune therapies later spawned newer criteria such as Choi, mRECIST, irRC, and iRECIST. In parallel, symptom-management assessment gained prominence: the Brief Pain Inventory quantified subjective pain, the Distress Thermometer enabled rapid psychological screening, and tools such as NRS-2002 and PG-SGA brought evidence-based nutritional risk assessment into routine practice. The CACA guideline weaves these threads into a single, unified pre-therapy evaluation framework.

The urgency of the effort is underscored by a nationwide survey conducted between September 2023 and February 2024 involving 2,236 healthcare professionals. The results revealed striking practice gaps: only 38.08 percent of respondents assessed performance status in every patient, psychosocial screening was offered in fewer than half of units for 61.28 percent of respondents, and genetic-risk assessment was performed in more than 10 percent of units by just 17.69 percent. While nursing assessments of pain and nutrition were robust, with coverage above 83 percent, and physician-led comorbidity assessment was common at 89.49 percent, significant barriers persisted. Roughly a third of professionals lacked knowledge or skills, 35.26 percent had no relevant training, nearly 20 percent cited absent guidelines, and almost half reported time constraints. The authors distill these obstacles into three phrases: “don’t know how,” “no time,” and “no standards.”

Technically, the guideline is remarkably granular. For general status, it mandates that evaluations of physical function, symptoms, and nutrition be completed within 24 hours of admission for inpatients. Performance status is appraised with the Karnofsky scale, scored 0 to 100 across 11 levels, and the simpler ECOG scale, scored 0 to 5, whose 1594 trial established ECOG 2 or higher as a cutoff indicating no benefit from chemotherapy in advanced non-small-cell lung cancer. For older adults, the Timed Up and Go test quantifies mobility and balance, with times under 10 seconds indicating good mobility and times over 20 seconds prompting deeper assessment. The guideline is careful to note that these scores are reference rather than absolute criteria: a breast cancer patient with a pathologic femoral fracture may still warrant surgery despite a Karnofsky score of 30, and a patient with small-cell lung cancer and ECOG 3 may still benefit from chemotherapy.

Organ function assessment occupies a central chapter. Cardiac evaluation relies on echocardiography, electrocardiography, and biomarkers such as troponin and brain natriuretic peptide, with risk-stratified monitoring schedules tied to left ventricular ejection fraction; a decline of more than 10 percent during therapy triggers treatment discontinuation and cardiopulmonary protection. Pulmonary assessment addresses the growing threat of drug-induced interstitial lung disease from chemotherapy, antibody-drug conjugates, and immunotherapy, recommending early high-resolution CT, which offers sensitivity above 90 percent, when new respiratory symptoms follow drug exposure. For thoracic surgery, the guideline integrates the Cardiopulmonary Risk Index and cardiopulmonary exercise testing, flagging high risk when FEV1 falls below 1.5 liters, DLCO below 60 percent, or VO2max below 10 mL/kg/min. Liver function is classified with the Child-Pugh system, kidney function tracked through glomerular filtration rate, and bone marrow readiness defined by thresholds such as an absolute neutrophil count of at least 1.5 × 10⁹ per liter and platelets of at least 80 × 10⁹ per liter.

Perhaps the most forward-looking sections address psychology and social context. In China, 30 to 50 percent of cancer patients experience psychological problems, and the guideline prescribes screening with the Distress Thermometer, the GAD-7 anxiety questionnaire, and depression instruments such as the PHQ-9 and HADS. Cognitive impairment receives unusual attention: 30 to 40 percent of patients show tumor-related cognitive deficits before chemotherapy, 75 percent decline during treatment, and 60 percent decline afterward, with the Mini-Mental State Examination and Montreal Cognitive Assessment serving as core tools. Sleep disorders, affecting 30 to 93.5 percent of cancer patients—roughly three times the general population—are screened with the Insomnia Severity Index and Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index. Strikingly, the guideline also endorses novel digital tools, including a multimodal psychological system that digitizes the PHQ-9 and GAD-7 and integrates heart-rate variability monitoring; clinical data cited show that this approach raised the objective response rate to immunotherapy in advanced lung cancer from 19.3 to 34.7 percent, and virtual-reality simulation of radiotherapy environments reduced treatment-related adverse events by 41 percent.

The guideline extends assessment into domains most oncology frameworks ignore. Family and social support are quantified with validated instruments including the SCNS-SF34 needs survey, the F-COPES family coping scale, and the CSNAT caregiver tool, with family members of advanced cancer patients explicitly designated as “indirect patients” given their elevated rates of depression and anxiety. Financial toxicity is measured with the COST-PROM instrument, where scores of 22 or below indicate high financial toxicity. Tumor biology is assessed through TNM staging and molecular subtyping, drawing on landmark Chinese multi-omics work in hepatocellular carcinoma, triple-negative breast cancer, and esophageal cancer. Genetic risk chapters cover BRCA1/2-associated hereditary breast and ovarian cancer, where cumulative breast cancer risk by age 80 reaches 72 percent for BRCA1 carriers, along with Lynch syndrome, familial adenomatous polyposis, hereditary thyroid, prostate, gastric, and pancreatic cancers. Fertility protection is framed as a mandatory consideration: an early survey found that although 92 percent of young oncology patients desired children, only 20 percent retained fertility, and the guideline stratifies gonadotoxic risk by drug class and radiation dose.

Uniquely, the document closes with a traditional Chinese medicine framework, defining eight core pathogenesis patterns—qi deficiency, yang deficiency, yin deficiency, blood deficiency, qi stagnation, phlegm-dampness, blood stasis, and heat toxin—and introducing the TCM Eight-Principle Syndrome Quantitative Evaluation Tool, a 100-point instrument with basic, tongue, and pulse modules that generates radar charts for dynamic monitoring. The authors acknowledge that implementation remains the central challenge, calling for strengthened training, guideline dissemination, streamlined workflows, and digital tools. But their ambition is unmistakable: with systematic, standardized, and dynamic holistic integrative assessment, they contend, oncology can move from empirical to precision medicine, delivering care that is simultaneously safer, more effective, and more humanistic—and advancing China’s strategic “Healthy China” goal in the process.

Beyond the enumerated scales and thresholds, the guideline reflects a broader shift in how assessment itself is conceptualized. Rather than a single checkpoint before therapy begins, CHIA is framed as a continuously repeated cycle in which findings feed back into evolving treatment decisions. This dynamic quality distinguishes it from static staging systems, since a patient’s nutritional state, psychological distress, and organ reserve can change substantially between treatment lines, meaning that an assessment performed once at diagnosis may quickly become obsolete.

The document also clarifies how different assessment domains interact in practice. Comorbidity and organ-function findings determine not only whether a therapy is tolerable but which modality is preferable, while family support and financial toxicity shape whether a prescribed regimen can realistically be completed. This interdependence explains why the authors insist on multidisciplinary execution rather than assessment by a single clinician, and why nursing-led screening for pain and nutrition complements physician-led evaluation of comorbidities rather than duplicating it.

The survey findings embedded in the guideline suggest that the main obstacles to adoption are organizational rather than conceptual. Because most respondents already recognized the value of comprehensive evaluation, the authors emphasize practical remedies: embedding standardized protocols into clinical workflows, offering structured training to close knowledge gaps, and deploying digital tools that automate data collection and display results in interpretable formats. Such measures respond directly to the twin barriers of limited time and absent standards.

As integrative oncology matures, frameworks of this kind may serve as templates for other health systems seeking to operationalize patient-centered care. By consolidating validated instruments across physical, psychological, social, genetic, and traditional medicine domains into one coherent process, the guideline demonstrates that holistic assessment can be systematic and measurable rather than aspirational, offering a concrete pathway from whole-person philosophy to everyday clinical decision-making.

Subject of Research: Cancer holistic integrative assessment guidelines for patient-centered oncology evaluation

Article Title: CACA Guidelines for holistic integrative assessment (2025)

Article References: Zhang, H., Shi, Q., Li, X., Li, Q., Liu, Y., Zhang, H., Lin, R., Zhou, W., Chu, Q., Min, J., Zheng, J., Liu, B., Chen, X., He, Y., Ni, L., Li, M., Cong, M., Liang, F., Wang, X., … Liu, D. (2026). CACA Guidelines for holistic integrative assessment (2025). Holistic Integrative Oncology, 5(1), Article 70. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44178-026-00277-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44178-026-00277-6

Keywords: CACA guidelines, holistic integrative oncology, cancer assessment, performance status, psycho-oncology, financial toxicity, genetic risk, fertility preservation, traditional Chinese medicine, precision oncology, China Anti-Cancer Association, patient-centered care