VivoSense recently published an American Society of Clinical Oncology’s JCO Clinical Cancer Informatics review article, Measuring What Is Meaningful in Cancer Cachexia Clinical Trials: A Path Forward With Digital Measures of Real-World Physical Behavior.
Cancer cachexia is a severe muscle-wasting syndrome impacting more than 80% of advanced cancer patients. Even though the burden of cachexia in cancer and its treatment is well documented, especially in patients’ physical functioning, there has not been any success in effective drug development.
In this narrative review, we summarize the existing methods of assessing physical functioning in cancer cachexia and discuss a path forward with digital health technologies (DHTs) that have the potential to provide a continuous, comprehensive and accurate assessment of real-world physical behavior in a less burdensome way. We also highlight recent developments in the regulatory and digital health community on the utilization of digital measures as clinical outcome assessment in drug development.
Overall, we discuss the importance of establishing measures that matter to patients, which require measuring outcomes that are derived from the concepts identified as meaningful to patients so that effective treatments can be developed in cancer cachexia.
Suvekshya Aryal, MPH; Shelby L. Bachman, PhD; Kaye Lyden, PhD; and Ieuan Clay, PhD