Quality-of-Life Improvement Is Highly Valued in Polycythemia Vera

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Quality-of-Life Improvement Is Highly Valued in Polycythemia Vera

Douglas A. Tremblay, MD, assistant professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York, New York, discusses the importance of quality-of-life data from treating patients with polycythemia vera with ropeginterferon alfa-2b-njft (Besremi).

Tremblay explains that quality of life with treatment is important to patients because they can potentially live decades with the disease. Results from the phase 3, open-label, randomized clinical trial PROUD-PV (NCT01949805) and its phase 3b extension trial CONTINUATION-PV (NCT02218047) showed that ropeginterferon led to low patient-reported symptom burden and less need for phlebotomy. According to Tremblay, data suggest that more symptomatic patients benefit the most from treatment.

He notes that some patients have decreased quality of life due to toxicity, and it is important to counsel patients on what to expect. Additionally, physicians should ask patients about their symptoms and use symptom scores to measure whether symptoms are improving or worsening with treatment, while also considering the toxicity caused by drugs. Weighing both the potential improvement and the toxicity can show the patient’s overall quality of life.

TRANSCRIPTION

0:10 | Quality of life and symptom burden are very key for patients with polycythemia vera. These patients thankfully live for, hopefully, decades, and so drugs that can improve someone's symptoms and improve someone's quality of life are really valued both by patients and providers. In terms of [ropeginterferon], there are significant improvements that you see with some metrics of quality of life. There are data to suggest that patients who are more symptomatic might get more benefit from these drugs, in terms of symptom burden as well. There are data that would suggest from this trial that improving quality of life happens in many of these patients, so it is important that that is something that you can counsel.

0:57 | But not all patients have improvement in symptom burden, and some patients may have decreasing quality of life because of toxicities. That's also very important to outline as well and set expectations. I think mainly what I would like to highlight is that it is important to ask patients how they're doing from a symptomatic standpoint, and to use different validated scores like the MPN Symptom Assessment Form Total Symptom Score to quantitate patients' symptoms to see if these are improving, stable, or worsening with therapies. But also pay attention to how these different drugs can impact patient's quality of life from a toxicity standpoint. Weighing both the improvements and the toxicity gives a good idea about how much overall improvement a patient is benefiting, particularly from a patient perspective and a quality-of-life perspective.