Cancer clinical trial eligibility criteria may create patient populations studied in trials that do not reflect the patient populations treated in the real-world setting. Follicular lymphoma (FL) is an indolent lymphoma with heterogeneous presentations across a broad range of individuals, resulting in many acceptable management strategies. We evaluated how first-line clinical trial eligibility criteria impacted the demographic makeup and outcomes of FL patients for whom systemic therapy might be considered. We compared the characteristics of 196 FL patients from a single institution to eligibility criteria from 10 first-line FL trials on ClinicalTrials.gov. Next, we tabulated eligibility criteria from 24 first-line FL protocols and evaluated their impact on 1198 FL patients with stages II-IV disease from the prospective Molecular Epidemiology Resource (MER) and Lymphoma Epidemiology of Outcomes (LEO) cohort studies. We found that 39.8% and 52.7% of FL patients might be excluded from clinical trials based on eligibility criteria derived from ClinicalTrials.gov and protocol documents, respectively. Patients excluded due to renal function, prior malignancy, and self-reported serious health conditions tended to be older. Expanding stage requirement from III-IV to II-IV and platelet requirement from ≥150 000 to ≥75 000 increased population size by 21% and 8%, respectively, in MER and by 16% and 13%, respectively, in LEO, without impacting patient demographics or outcomes. These data suggest that management of older individuals with FL may not be fully informed by recent clinical trials. Moreover, liberalizing stage and platelet criteria might expand the eligible population and allow for quicker trial accrual without impacting outcomes.
This research output has an Altmetric Attention Score of 2. This is our high-level measure of the quality and quantity of online attention that it has received. This Attention Score, as well as the ranking and number of research outputs shown below, was calculated when the research output was last mentioned on 07 July 2022.
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