Health-related quality of life in patients treated for anaplastic oligodendroglioma with adjuvant chemotherapy: results of a European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer randomized clinical trial.

PURPOSE: Little is known about the health-related quality of life (HRQOL) of patients treated for anaplastic oligodendrogliomas. The impact of combined procarbazine, CCNU (lomustine), and vincristine (PCV) chemotherapy after radiotherapy (RT) compared with RT alone on HRQOL in the randomized European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) 26951 trial was studied. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Adult patients with anaplastic oligodendrogliomas received RT alone or RT plus PCV chemotherapy. HRQOL was assessed with the EORTC Quality of Life Questionnaire C30 and Brain Cancer Module. Seven prespecified HRQOL end points were selected. We hypothesized that chemotherapy would impair HRQOL during treatment but that there would be a similar HRQOL between treatment arms once off treatment. Assessments were performed at randomization, at the end of RT, and then every 3 to 6 months until progression. RESULTS: A total of 368 patients were randomly assigned to one of the two arms; overall, 58% were male, and the median age was 49 years. Compliance with HRQOL was 78% at baseline and dropped to 55% to 72% up to 2.5 years post-RT. Baseline scores demonstrated considerable impairments in HRQOL for both treatment groups. The longitudinal analysis showed a significant increase in nausea/vomiting in the RT plus PCV chemotherapy arm during and shortly after chemotherapy. Because of a difference in baseline scores for fatigue and physical functioning, the differences between treatment arms during PCV did not reach significance. The nonselected scales of appetite loss and drowsiness demonstrated significant differences between treatment arms during chemotherapy in favor of the RT arm. The long-term results showed no difference between arms. CONCLUSION: The major impact of PCV on HRQOL is on nausea/vomiting, loss of appetite, and drowsiness during and shortly after treatment. There are no long-term effects of PCV chemotherapy.

Prognostic value of health-related quality-of-life data in predicting survival in patients with anaplastic oligodendrogliomas, from a phase III EORTC brain cancer group study.

PURPOSE: This is one of a few studies that have explored the value of baseline symptoms and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) in predicting survival in patients with brain cancer. PATIENTS AND METHODS: Baseline HRQOL scores (from the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer [EORTC] Quality of Life Questionnaire C30 and the EORTC Brain Cancer Module) were examined in 247 patients with anaplastic oligodendrogliomas to determine the relationship with overall survival by using Cox proportional hazards regression models. Refined techniques as the bootstrap resampling procedure and the computation of C indexes and R2 coefficients were used to explore the stability of the models as well as better assess the potential benefit of using HRQOL to predict survival in clinical practice and research. RESULTS: Classical analysis controlled for major clinical prognostic factors selected emotional functioning (P = .0016), communication deficit (P = .0261), future uncertainty (P = .0481), and weakness of legs (P = .0001) as statistically significant prognostic factors of survival. However, several issues question the validity of these findings and no single model was found to be preferable over all others. C indexes, which estimate the probability of a model to correctly predict which patient among a randomly chosen pair of patients will survive longer, and R2 coefficients, which measure the proportion of variability explained by the model, did not exhibit major improvement when adding selected or all HRQOL scores to clinical factors. CONCLUSION: While classical techniques lead to positive results, more refined analyses suggest that baseline HRQOL scores add relatively little to clinical factors to predict survival. These results may have implications for future use of HRQOL as a prognostic factor for patients with cancer.