Sophie Pilleron, FNR ATTRACT Fellow, Group leader at Luxembourg Institute of Health, shared on LinkedIn:
“Let’s discuss: Have we collected enough associational evidence in geriatric oncology?
A few months ago, I wrote a piece titled ‘Moving Beyond Mere Association‘: Read the article.
This commentary was mainly methodological, but it is related to this present piece, in which I argue that we, as researchers, need to move from purely associational studies to more interventional studies.
This piece was also inspired by the idea of doing less, but better, and by the movement advocating for less futile research so that we can devote more time to useful, relevant, high-quality research.
In geriatric oncology, many published studies focus on how chronological age or frailty is associated with lower treatment receipt (all treatment types have been studied), across all cancer types (find a cancer type for which there is no study related to frailty!), and across virtually all clinical outcomes (name an outcome that has not been examined in associational studies).
Admittedly, most of this evidence comes from high-income countries.
However, who believes that these associations would not hold in other settings?
I do not see any reason. We do not need more studies showing that frailty is associated with worse outcomes.
We do not need to spend more time and money on these types of studies.
Instead, we need to act to improve the care and quality of life of older adults with cancer.
Fortunately, we are now seeing more and more trials assessing the effectiveness of interventions based on comprehensive geriatric assessment. These interventions sometimes work, sometimes they do not.
That is okay. We need to keep trying to identify interventions that best suit different settings.
However, the published trials have almost all been conducted in high-income countries (one has been done in India (10.7759/cureus.114399).
What I would like to see is more interventional research conducted in other parts of the world. Let’s keep trying.
We need to focus our energy, time, and public funding on achieving the ultimate goal: improving the care of older adults with cancer.
Happy to have your thoughts on this.”
Other articles about geriatric oncology on OncoDaily.