Health-related quality of life in patients with inoperable malignant bowel obstruction: secondary outcome from a double-blind, parallel, placebo-controlled randomised trial of octreotide

What Was Tested

This randomized controlled trial paper looks at Octreotide.

This analysis aims to evaluate health-related quality of life (HrQoL) (primary outcome for this analysis), nausea and vomiting, and pain in patients with inoperable malignant bowel obstruction (IMBO) due to cancer or its treatments randomised to standardised therapies plus octreotide or placebo over a maximum of 72 h in a double-blind clinical trial.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Adults with IMBO and vomiting recruited through 12 services spanning inpatient, consultative and community settings in Australia were randomised to subcutaneous octreotide infusion or saline.

HrQoL was measured at baseline and treatment cessation (EORTC QLQ-C15-PAL).

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

The participants were allocated by chance, so the Octreotide group and the comparison group should start out alike.

As a double-blind Octreotide study, the assignments were hidden from both participants and investigators until the end.

The comparison arm used a placebo, so changes seen with Octreotide could be set against what happens without it.

Mean within-group paired differences between baseline and post-treatment scores were analysed using Wilcoxon Signed Rank test and between group differences estimated using linear mixed models, adjusted for baseline score, sex, age, time, and study arm.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Antineoplastic Agents, Hormonal, Case-Control Studies, Intestinal Obstruction, Neoplasms, Octreotide, Prognosis and Quality of Life.

Author keywords: Palliative care, Patient-reported outcome measures, Randomised controlled trials and Terminal care.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Octreotide.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2020 (BMC cancer), a journal based in England.

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