A study looking at quality of life in men with prostate cancer that has spread

Cancer type:

Prostate cancer

Status:

Results

Phase:

Other

This study looked at quality of life in men who have prostate cancer that has spread and hormone therapy is no longer working.

More about this trial

Prostate cancer that has spread to another part of your body is called metastatic prostate cancer. Doctors can treat metastatic prostate cancer with hormone therapy, but the treatment may stop working and the cancer can start to grow again. This is called metastatic castrate resistant prostate cancer.

The research team wanted to learn more about how metastatic prostate cancer affects men’s quality of life. They measured the quality of life of men with metastatic prostate cancer when hormone therapy had stopped working.

The aim of this study was to collect information about quality of life at different points in men’s treatment.

Summary of results

This study recruited 163 men who had prostate cancer that had spread. They’d all had hormone therapy. They were put into 4 groups, depending on whether they’d had chemotherapy or not. Of those taking part:

50 men had no symptoms, or mild symptoms, and had not had chemotherapy yet (group 1)
50 men had symptoms but hadn’t had chemotherapy yet (group 2)
17 men were having chemotherapy (group 3)
46 men had already had chemotherapy (group 4)

All the men taking part completed 5 different questionnaires online. The research team sent them a link to the questionnaires so that they could complete them at home. They were:

a screening questionnaire to make sure they were eligible to take part
a general questionnaire asking about medical history and background information such as ethnic group and education level
a questionnaire called EQ-5D-5L which asks about general level of health as well as things such as mobility, pain and anxiety levels
a cancer related questionnaire called EORTC-QLQ-C30 which asks 30 questions about health during the last week
a prostate cancer specific questionnaire called EORTC PR-25 which asks 25 questions about any current symptoms or problems caused by prostate cancer

The research team analysed the answers to each of these, and gave them all a score. They then looked at the average scores for each questionnaire, for men at different stages of their treatment.

The results showed that men in group 1 who hadn’t had chemotherapy yet and had no, or mild, symptoms had a relatively high quality of life. They also, perhaps not surprisingly, had the mildest symptoms according to the EORTC PR-25 questionnaire.

The quality of life scores were lower for men in groups 2, 3 and 4. In most of the questionnaires, the men in group 2 had the lowest quality of life score and the most symptoms.

The research team compared the results from the different questionnaires. They found that the pattern of results for the EQ-5D-5L and the EORTC-QLQ-C30 was similar to each other across the 4 groups.

The research team concluded that these questionnaires were an accurate way to measure quality of life. And that collecting information online could be a useful way to measure quality of life for men with metastatic prostate cancer.

We have based this summary on information from the research team. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed Open a glossary item

) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team who did the research. We have not analysed the data ourselves.