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Conference Report: ECPC Virtual Metastatic Breast Cancer Roundtable

·1 min read · Conferences

Screenshot of organisations involved in ECPC Roundtable

We mentioned that the European Cancer Patient Coalition was undertaking a ‘Virtual Roundtable’. Bex Lewis attended the event (and contributed quite a bit to the chat, including questions about how having to attend appointments alone is perceived by oncologists), and captured a few slides from the conference:

A roundtable slide headed Roundtable objectives: the value of staying in a progression-free survival state, patient preferences for treatment and decision making, and the relative importance of efficacy, quality of life, symptom burden and caregiver burden.A roundtable slide on the targeted literature review methodology, listing the databases, journals, clinical guidelines and patient advocacy sources searched.A roundtable slide showing the literature review workflow, narrowing thousands of articles down to a final list of around fifty.A roundtable slide defining surrogate endpoints, and defining progression-free survival as the length of time during and after treatment that a patient lives with the disease without it getting worse.

A roundtable slide asking whether surrogate survival endpoints are hard for patients to relate to, citing studies showing that clinical trial endpoint terminology does not resonate with patients.A roundtable discussion slide asking how patients can be better educated about surrogate survival endpoints, how they interpret progression-free survival, and which endpoints matter most in the absence of overall survival data.A roundtable slide on patient preferences and treatment decision making, reporting that patients place high value on both overall survival and progression-free survival and are generally willing to endure side effects to improve survival.A roundtable discussion slide asking how patient and physician dialogue about treatment goals could be improved, and what barriers patients face in communicating their expectations.A roundtable slide on quality of life and symptom burden, reporting that patients whose disease progresses experience significantly greater deterioration in health-related quality of life.A roundtable discussion slide asking how patients define quality of life, which symptoms matter most to minimise, and how important the mode of treatment administration is.A roundtable discussion slide asking how patients account for the impact of a therapy on their caregivers, and whether there are other impacts on caregivers not reflected in the summary.

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