Study limitations
anaemia, cancer suffering
ANAEMIA, SECONDARY, ADVANCED CANCER, RECRUITMENT
The secondary outcome measures are intended to indicate a direction of effect and
all such results should be interpreted with caution in this unpowered study.
Participant recruitment and attrition data are encouraging but may differ
outside of a specialist palliative service within secondary care. The disruption
of the COVID-19 pandemic also impacted final recruitment figures. Despite this
there were important indicators of efficacy for intravenous iron across both
objective and subjective outcome measures and our recruitment threshold of 30
participants was passed.In conclusion, the present study design was feasible and demonstrated that
intravenous iron may be efficacious at improving haemoglobin and iron stores in
people with palliative cancer suffering from symptomatic anaemia. These changes
appeared to be linked to improvements in participant quality of life across
select measures including fatigue-specific domains. The results should inform
the design of a definitive trial of this treatment for people with anaemia in
advanced cancer.