Cancer clinical trials have relied on overall survival and measures of tumor growth or reduction to assess the efficacy of a drug. However, benefits are often accompanied by significant symptomatic toxicities.
The degree to which a therapy improves disease symptoms and introduces symptomatic toxicity affects how patients function in their daily lives. These concepts are important contributors to health-related quality of life (HRQOL). In this article, we discuss patient-reported outcome (PRO) assessment in cancer trials and challenges relying solely on static multi-item HRQOL instruments. We propose focusing on three separate measures of well-defined concepts: symptomatic adverse events, physical function, and disease-related symptoms, which are key contributors to the effect of a therapy on HRQOL. Separate measures of these three concepts may facilitate the incorporation of emerging contemporary instruments that can tailor the PRO assessment strategy to different trial contexts. Irrespective of the PRO measures used, continued improvement in trial design and conduct is crucial to decrease missing data and optimize the quality of PRO information. International stakeholder collaboration and continued research into optimal practices for PRO and other clinical outcome assessments are necessary to advance a common framework for generating and reporting rigorous patient-centered data from cancer clinical trials.
Clinical cancer research : an official journal of the American Association for Cancer Research. 2016 Jan 12 [Epub]
Paul G Kluetz, Ashley Slagle, Elektra J Papadopoulos, Laura Lee Johnson, Martha Donoghue, Virginia E Kwitkowski, Wen-Hung Chen, Rajeshwari Sridhara, Ann T Farrell, Patricia Keegan, Geoffrey Kim, Richard Pazdur
Office of Hematology and Oncology Products, Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland. ., Clinical Outcome Assessment Staff, Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland., Office of Biostatistics, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland., Office of Hematology and Oncology Products, Office of New Drugs, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration, Silver Spring, Maryland.