Patients With CLL in India: Quality-of-Life Analysis
Posted: Tuesday, December 8, 2020
According to research published in the European Journal of Haematology, patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) may experience significant impacts on their quality of life. The study analyzed quality-of-life data on patients in India, where CLL is less common overall but tends to occur in a younger population than in high-income countries.
“Patient-reported outcomes like quality-of-life…analyses are increasingly incorporated into clinical trials,” noted Deepesh P. Lad, MD, of the Postgraduate Institute of Medical Education and Research in India, and colleagues. “This is important where therapies that do not affect overall survival but differ by an anticipated gain in quality of life are compared.”
Between 2018 and 2019, the study included 127 consecutive patients with CLL who did not have severe comorbidities; 92 were male, 35 were female, and 100 participants acted as age-matched, healthy controls. Among the patient group, 52 were on a watch-and-wait protocol, 47 had completed chemoimmunotherapy within the previous month, 23 were undergoing chemoimmunotherapy, and 15 were receiving ibrutinib therapy. A pair of quality-of-life questionnaires, the EORTC QLQ-C30 and QLQ-CLL17, were distributed in regional languages.
Regardless of the treatment protocol, all members of the patient group reported significantly reduced quality of life across all functional domains versus the control group. Among patients undergoing the wait-and-watch protocol, global health status and emotional scores were the most meaningfully affected domains, with higher scores in fatigue, financial difficulties, and health-related worries/fears compared with other symptom scores. Across all patient treatment subgroups, patients receiving chemoimmunotherapy reported more health-related worries/fears than those receiving ibrutinib. Patients on chemoimmunotherapy also had the lowest global health score, whereas patients with a low socioeconomic status reported higher financial difficulty. Quality of life did not appear to differ based on age or sex.
Disclosure: The study authors reported no conflicts of interest.
