Attack Inflammation to Boost Quality of Life in Advanced Cancer Patients

By Reuters Staff

NEW YORK - A new study ties systemic inflammation to reduced quality of life, independent of performance status, in patients with advanced cancer, suggesting that efforts to reduce systemic inflammation are warranted, the researchers say.

Quality of life is a key element of cancer care, but the factors that determine quality of life are not well understood. To investigate, Dr. Barry Laird from University of Edinburgh, United Kingdom, and colleagues looked at the relationship between quality of life parameters, performance status (PS), and systemic inflammation in more than 2,500 patients with advanced cancer, most commonly gastrointestinal and pulmonary cancers.

The patients had a median survival was 4.25 months. Results showed that increasing systemic inflammation assessed by modified Glasgow Performance Score (mGPS) and deteriorating PS assessed using the ECOG classification were associated with deterioration in quality-of-life parameters (p<0.001).

Of note, increasing systemic inflammation was associated with deterioration in quality-of-life parameters independent of PS, the researchers report in the Journal of Clinical Oncology, online June 27.

To their knowledge, this is the first study to examine how the combination of PS and systemic inflammation relates to functional and symptom scales of quality of life in patients with advanced cancer.

"In particular, the results of this study show a clear and consistent relationship between worsening of quality-of-life parameters, such as global health, role, physical and social functioning, and fatigue, pain, appetite symptoms with increased systemic inflammation, independent of good PS," they write.

"The implications of these results are several and profound," they say.

The findings "support the rationale that attenuation of the systemic inflammatory response may improve quality of life in patients with advanced cancer. Now there is a sound rationale for a proactive or preventative approach to treating symptoms in advanced cancer and the systemic inflammatory response is a feasible target for this."

They conclude, "The increasing implementation of immunotherapies in the treatment of advanced cancer provide a fertile ground for expanding the role of these therapies in improving patients' quality of life. After all, in patients with advanced cancer, optimizing quality of life is the central tenet of cancer care."

The study had no commercial funding. One author reported ties to pharmaceutical companies.

SOURCE: https://bit.ly/29545hy

J Clin Oncol 2016.

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