CHICAGO — The major worry of men with prostate cancer is their ability to maintain a good quality of life, according to a poster presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology.
The finding, from a Web-based survey of 2,128 men with prostate cancer, was “surprising, but not shocking” lead researcher, Dr. Richard J. Gralla, president of the New York Lung Cancer Alliance in New York City, said in an interview.
Sex also was a major concern of the men, he noted, much more than pain but less than not being able to sleep.
Dr. Gralla and colleagues collaborated with NexCura, (www.nexcura.com
The investigators invited men with prostate cancer to rank 18 issues on a 5-point scale according to their importance. The survey was conducted anonymously over a 3-day period.
Following good quality of life, the next four most important concerns were maintaining independence, ability to sleep, sexual functioning, and incontinence.
“Sleep was ranked very highly by the patients. It was a surprise to me to see how important this was,” Dr. Gralla said.
Another surprise was the importance of maintaining independence.
“We thought this might be because our survey respondents were all men, and it might be a gender-specific thing to fear becoming dependent. But we have since done the same thing for patients with lung cancer, where half the respondents are women, and have seen the same result.”
Hot flashes, which many physicians think would be important to the men who have them, ranked near the bottom of respondents' concerns. So did pain, and poor appetite. “For families, eating, weight loss, appetite, are all very important, but the patients do not rank these so highly,” Dr. Gralla said.
“Using this Web-based program, we were able to get opinions from over 2,000 patients with prostate cancer, which is far and away the largest effort for content validity,” he said “Patient-reported outcomes, or PROs, can yield interesting and important information that may be more accurate than health professionals have heretofore expected, and provide a very good way for patients to be able to communicate with health care professionals.