IRONMAN: Enhancing Survivorship in Patients with Advanced Prostate Cancer

Principal Investigators: Lorelei Mucci, ScD, MPH (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Daniel George, MD (Duke University)

Co-Investigators: Dana Rathkopf, MD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Konrad Stopsack, MD, MPH (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Terry Hyslop, PhD (Duke University), Karen Autio, MD (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center), Deborah Enting, MD, PhD (Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust)

Young Investigators: Yiwen Zhang, PhD (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health), Hannah McManus, MD (Duke University)

Description:

• Patients with advanced prostate cancer are at greatest risk of cancer death, but also suffer quality of life deterioration and adverse events due to the cancer and its therapies.
• Understanding the factors that impact survivorship outcomes, risk factors for adverse events, and unmet needs of patients, will allow the identification of opportunities and strategies for helping patients to thrive despite living with advanced prostate cancer.
• IRONMAN is a global registry that collects real-world clinical, demographic, and lifestyle data, as well as tissue and blood samples, from patients newly diagnosed with metastatic hormone sensitive or castration resistant prostate cancer.
• In this project, Drs. Lorelei Mucci, Daniel George, and team will leverage data from IRONMAN on over 1,500 patients with advanced prostate cancer, to study the relationships between clinical, demographic and lifestyle factors, with survivorship outcomes, with a focus on racial health disparities.
• How patient-reported quality of life domains such as cognitive function, sleep quality, pain, fatigue, and psychosocial health are associated with demographic, clinical, and lifestyle factors including physical activity, will be investigated, to identify factors that predict flourishing after diagnosis of advanced prostate cancer.
• The impact of patient demographic and clinical factors on treatment decisions, treatment disparities, and clinical outcomes will be investigated.
• “Biological aging,” which can be measured by analyzing the state of DNA, may be accelerated past a patient’s chronological age by hormonal therapy and comorbidities. The relationships between biological age and quality of life measurements, serious adverse events, and overall survival, will be investigated.
• If successful, this project will identify relationships between clinical, demographic, and lifestyle factors, and patient quality of life and outcomes. This will enable the identification of strategies for improving quality of life, extending survival, and reducing health disparities for patients with advanced prostate cancer.

What this means to patients:  Survivorship is a field of oncology which aims to understand and improve quality of life in patients living with or after cancer. Drs. Mucci, George, and team’s project focuses on understanding patients’ cancer experience and quality of life, their prognosis, and treatment disparities. These findings will inform practice, identify unmet needs, reduce disparities, and identify strategies for advanced prostate cancer patients to flourish.