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Enhancing Quality of Life in Advanced Breast Cancer: The Role of Palbociclib

Advanced breast cancer often comes with significant physical symptoms, such as pain and fatigue, as well as side effects from treatments. The diagnosis and treatment of advanced breast cancer can lead to anxiety, depression and stress. Improving a patient’s quality of life can help manage these symptoms more effectively, making daily life more bearable. Focusing on quality of life in the face of a challenging diagnosis has become a primary goal of breast cancer therapy, particularly in the advanced setting, where outcomes are often poor.

Palbociclib, a first-in-class cyclin-dependent kinase 4/6 (CDK4/6) inhibitor, received approval from the United States (U.S.) Food and Drug Administration in 2015 for the treatment of hormone receptor-positive (HR+) and human epidermal growth factor receptor 2-negative (HER2-) advanced breast cancer (aBC) or metastatic breast cancer (mBC). Although it’s been on the U.S. market for almost a decade, the overall impact of treatment with palbociclib on patients’ quality of life remains unclear.

To help shine light on this matter, the Value & Evidence team at EVERSANA (Alexandra Hall, Bao-Ngoc Nguyen, Meaghan Bartlett and Imtiaz A. Samjoo) – along with Dr. Nadia Harbeck, Dr. Meghan Karuturi, Mary Lou Smith and the team at Pfizer Inc. (Joseph C Cappelleri, Doris Makari, Lillian Shahied Arruda, Rickard Sandin, Kent Hanson and Justin Doan) – conducted a comprehensive systematic literature review to summarize all of the publicly available evidence on quality of life in patients with HR+/HER2- aBC or mBC treated with palbociclib over the entire time span of its approval.

Across all the evidence identified, quality of life, along with important breast cancer patient symptoms and measures, such as physical functioning, pain and fatigue, was found to be maintained with palbociclib treatment. Overall, we found that the addition of palbociclib to other traditional breast cancer therapies in patients with HR+/HER2- aBC or mBC, while providing a clinical benefit, does not negatively impact or worsen a patient’s quality of life.

Additionally, the team recognizes Joanna Bielecki for her valuable contributions to the study.

For a deeper understanding, access the article here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39254990/.

Author
headshot of Alexander Hall
Alexandra Hall
Associate Manager, HEOR

Alex is an associate manager on the Value & Evidence team at EVERSANA and supports various projects in Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR). Since joining the team in 2021, Alex has been involved…

Ngoc Nguyen
Research Associate

Since joining EVERSANA as a Research Associate in 2023, Ngoc has been involved in conducting systematic literature reviews, budget impact analyses, cost-effectiveness analyses, and real-world evidence studies.​ Ngoc has authored 8 publications and has…

Meaghan Bartlett headshot
Meaghan Bartlett
Manager, Evidence Synthesis

Meaghan is a project manager with over six years of experience in systematic literature reviews, indirect treatment comparisons and scientific communications. In her time as part of the Value & Evidence team at EVERSANA,…

Imtiaz Samjoo
Senior Director, Value & Evidence

As Senior Director of the Value & Evidence team at EVERSANA, Imtiaz leads evidence synthesis projects that support global HEOR initiatives involving systematic literature reviews, indirect treatment comparisons, and health economic modeling,  to support reimbursement…