Phase III study of pasireotide long-acting release in patients with metastatic neuroendocrine tumors and carcinoid symptoms refractory to available somatostatin analogues

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Octreotide and Somatostatin, published as a randomized controlled trial.

Objective tumor response was a secondary outcome.

Why It Was Studied

In a randomized, double-blind, Phase III study, the researchers compared pasireotide long-acting release (pasireotide LAR) with octreotide long-acting repeatable (octreotide LAR) in managing carcinoid symptoms refractory to first-generation somatostatin analogues.

Primary outcome was symptom control based on frequency of bowel movements and flushing episodes.

Who Took Part

PubMed indexes the participants as adults, middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

The design is described as randomized and double-blind.

Because people in this Octreotide study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Octreotide, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

What Was Measured

Primary outcome was symptom control based on frequency of bowel movements and flushing episodes.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Antineoplastic Agents, Carcinoid Tumor, Digestive System Neoplasms, Disease-Free Survival, Drug Resistance, Neoplasm, Drug Substitution and Kaplan-Meier Estimate.

The authors tagged it with the keywords carcinoid syndrome, neuroendocrine tumors, pasireotide, progression-free survival, somatostatin analogues and symptom control.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized and double-blind study of Octreotide and Somatostatin.

The publication is from 2015 (Drug design, development and therapy), a journal based in New Zealand.

More context: the Octreotide compound page and the Somatostatin compound page, all human trials.