Journal of clinical oncology : official journal of the American Society of Clinical Oncology
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Hospice services are designed to meet the needs of patients near the end of life. Although so-called open-access hospice programs and bridge programs are beginning to offer these services to patients who are still receiving treatment, it is not known whether they best meet patients' needs. ⋯ Patients who are receiving active treatment for cancer, and even those who are willing to stop treatment, express a clear preference for alternative supportive care services over traditional hospice services. Supportive care programs for patients with advanced cancer should reconsider the services that they offer and might seek to include novel services in addition to, or perhaps instead of, traditional hospice services.
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Multicenter Study
Understanding of prognosis and goals of care among couples whose child died of cancer.
Little is known about how couples care for the terminally ill child with cancer. We assessed both parents' understanding of prognosis and treatment goals for children with cancer and explored whether sex mediates these views. We also investigated whether discordance within couples regarding treatment goals was related to parental perception of the child's end-of-life (EOL) experience. ⋯ Though parent goals are often concurrent at diagnosis, they frequently differ during the EOL period. Parent disagreement about the goal of lessening suffering at the EOL appears to impact how parents describe their child's experience of suffering. Creating opportunities for parents to work through their goals together may lead to improvements in the child's EOL experience.
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Because the appropriate design and end points for phase II evaluation of targeted anticancer agents are unclear, we undertook a review of recent reports of phase II trials of targeted agents to determine the types of designs used, the planned end points, the outcomes, and the relationship between trial outcomes and regulatory approval. ⋯ In practice, phase II design for targeted agents is similar to that for cytotoxics. Objective response seems to be a useful end point for screening new targeted agents because, in our review, its observation predicted for eventual success. Improvements in design are recommended, as is more frequent inclusion of biological questions as part of phase II trials.
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Patient-reported outcomes (PROs), routinely collected as a part of cancer clinical trials, have been linked with survival in numerous clinical studies, but a comprehensive critical review has not been reported. This study systematically assessed the impact of PROs on patient survival after a cancer diagnosis within the context of clinical trials. ⋯ PROs might be considered for stratification purposes in future trials, as they were often better predictors of survival than PS. Studies are needed to determine whether interventions that improve PROs also increase survival and to identify explanatory mechanisms through which PROs relate to survival.
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Nomograms are widely used for cancer prognosis, primarily because of their ability to reduce statistical predictive models into a single numerical estimate of the probability of an event, such as death or recurrence, that is tailored to the profile of an individual patient. User-friendly graphical interfaces for generating these estimates facilitate the use of nomograms during clinical encounters to inform clinical decision making. However, the statistical underpinnings of these models require careful scrutiny, and the degree of uncertainty surrounding the point estimates requires attention. This guide provides a nonstatistical audience with a methodological approach for building, interpreting, and using nomograms to estimate cancer prognosis or other health outcomes.