Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Review of Cancer Fatigue Therapy
JNCI has a metaanalysis of the pharmacologic treatment of cancer related fatigue. Most interesting was that it pools data on the two randomized, placebo-controlled trials looking at methylphenidate for cancer fatigue (one from a 'palliative care' population which we blogged about before and the other a breast cancer chemotherapy population...I can't find the actual paper referenced in the article but it appears to be regarding this trial). Even though the palliative care population article was negative, and showed no treatment benefit for methylphenidate over placebo (there was a trend towards benefit but it wasn't statistically significant), when those data were combined with the other trial the authors of the metaanalysis concluded that indeed methylphenidate is effective. (The data could be combined relatively easily as both trials used the same outcome measure.)