Preferences for treatment to delay bone metastases (BM) in patients with castration-resistant prostate cancer (CRPC) at high risk of developing BM.
Qian, Y; Hauber, AB; Gonzalez, JM; Posner, J; Mohamed, AF; Tombal, B; Body, J-J; Gatta, F; Arellano, J
Published in: Journal of Clinical Oncology
117 Background: Limited treatments are available for patients with non-metastatic CRPC. Prophylactic treatment may be associated with adverse events (AE). We evaluated patient preferences for a medication delaying bone metastases (BM) with a risk of AE.Methods: UK and Swedish adults with CRPC at high risk for BM (on androgen-deprivation or hormone therapy for ≥ 3 yrs) completed an online discrete-choice experiment with 10 choice questions. Patients were asked if they would prefer to receive a hypothetical prophylactic medication (HPM) with a risk of osteonecrosis of the jaw (ONJ) to prevent BM or to decline HPM thus not receiving any treatment benefit or risk. HPMs were defined by delay in BM (0-23 months) and risk of ONJ (0-9%). The proportion of patients who chose HPM with different combinations of BM delay and ONJ risk was calculated. To further evaluate the impact of BM to patients, time tradeoff was used to assess patients’ willingness to trade off between life years with and without bone complications (i.e., skeletal-related events, including spinal cord compression, surgery or radiation to bone, and pathologic fracture).Results: A total of 201 UK patients and 200 Swedish patients completed the survey. As shown in the table, even a HPM with the lowest level of BM delay (5 months) and the highest level of ONJ risk (9%) was acceptable to the majority of patients in both countries. Furthermore, when asked about the tradeoff between life years with and without bone complications, 52% of UK patients and 26% of Swedish patients were willing to trade off 5 months of survival to avoid bone complications; nearly three-quarters of the patients were willing to trade off 3 months of survival to avoid bone complications. Conclusions: A majority of patients in the UK and Sweden were willing to take HPMs to delay BM, despite a treatment-related risk of ONJ and were willing to trade off 3 to 5 months of survival to avoid bone complications. [Table: see text]
