medwireNews: Men with high-risk nonmetastatic castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) do not report a deterioration in health-related quality of life (HRQoL) when androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) is supplemented with apalutamide, indicate SPARTAN trial results.
In a prespecified HRQoL analysis of the phase III trial comprising 1207 patients, the total and subscale scores of the Functional Assessment of Cancer Therapy-Prostate (FACT-P) and EuroQol five-dimension, three-level (EQ-5D-3L) questionnaires remained generally stable over the course of 29 cycles of treatment with ADT plus either apalutamide 240 mg/day or placebo.
And further exploration showed the mean decreases relative to baseline tended to be greater in the placebo than apalutamide group for most of the HRQoL scales, with curves starting to separate in favor of the androgen receptor inhibitor between cycles 11 and 29, after which there were too few patients in the placebo group to merit further analysis.
Therefore, Fred Saad, from the University of Montreal in Quebec, Canada, and colleagues conclude in The Lancet Oncology that “[t]he extension of median metastasis-free survival by 2 years shown in SPARTAN, and maintenance of HRQOL from treatment initiation in this mostly asymptomatic population, suggests that apalutamide provides clinical benefit” in these patients.
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