A comparison of simple single-item measures and the NCI Common Toxicity Criteria version 3.0 measure of peripheral neuropathy.
1557 Background: Peripheral neuropathy (PN), a common and intrusive side effect of chemotherapy in clinical trials, has been assessed via the clinician-rated common terminology criteria for adverse events (CTCAE) and/or patient-reported outcome (PRO) measures (Morton, ASCO, 2005). We assessed the relative sensitivity of CTCAE and PRO measures for evaluating interventions for preventing and ameliorating CIPN. Methods: Data from285 patients in two prevention trials (N05C3, N04C7) and 432 patients from three intervention trials (N00C3, N01C3, N06CA) were analyzed separately. CTCAE version 3.0 item for neuropathy was compared to 2 NCCTG numerical analogue CIPN items, 6 EORTC CIPN20 individual items, 2 McGill Pain Questionnaire items, and one Brief Pain Inventory item. The sample size provided over 80% power to detect a true Spearman rank correlation of 0.15 assessed the relationship between CTCAE and PRO measures. Results: Results from both the prevention and treatment trials were similar in terms of the relationship between the CTCAE and PRO measures. No correlation coefficients between the CTCAE and any of the PRO items at baseline were above 0.35, with the majority around 0.2. Higher scores for the numbness items were observed than for the CTCAE in 47% of the patients at baseline and 39% during treatment in the treatment trials. Many patients had severe numbness PRO scores but mild CTCAE scores (12%) at baseline and (8%) during treatment in the treatment trials. Results for the numbness and tingling PRO measures were redundant. The correlations of the CTCAE with pain were weak, all below 0.35 at baseline with differences as much as 29 points on average on a 0-100 transformed scale. Conclusions: The CTCAE and PRO measures of PN measure different constructs. The CTCAE includes both functional and ADL/motor aspects which may or may not be related to the singular constructs of pain, numbness, tingling, or adjectival characteristics of pain assessed by the PRO measures. The two measures cannot be used in place of each other.