Discussion
breast cancer, cancer, Cancer-related pain, pain, lung cancer
BREAST CANCER, CANCER, ADVANCED CANCER, LUNG CANCER, REGRESSION
The findings of the present RWD study reveal significant improvements of self-reported QoL in LC patients receiving VA therapy alone or in addition to radiotherapy.Regarding QoL, it has been shown in clinical trials that VA treatment reduces chemotherapy-related side effects and improve tolerability, which then in turn may have a positive impact on QoL [In breast cancer patients it was previously described that several EORTC QLQ-C30 functioning as well as symptoms scales improved in association with concomitant VA therapy [In the present RWD study, marked, although not significant, reductions ranging from 10 to 18 points were observed for all the symptom scales except financial difficulties in patients receiving VA treatment without radiation (Table Cancer-related pain is multifactorial, and for that optimal pain relief multimodal treatments including anticancer therapies and analgesics should be implemented to achieve the best possible QoL. According to WHO recommendations, radiotherapy is used to reduce the need for analgesics and improve QoL [Even though patients in the combined RadVA group had more advanced cancer stages than the other groups (Table Limitations of our study include the non-randomized, non-controlled, and unblinded nature of the study design which is prone to various biases including selection bias. A possible bias arises from the fact that the observation period was 12 months and therefore no conclusions can be drawn about the QoL of patients who were unable or unwilling to respond after 12 months, or who were already deceased. However, we tried to reduce confounding bias by conducting adjusted multivariate linear regression analyses. Nevertheless, this RWD study provides implications for the clinical efficacy of concomitant VA treatment for LC patients being consistent with published data in LC patients and for other cancer entities. The strengths of our study include the presentation of real-world care of LC patients in a German certified lung cancer center.