Treatment of AIDS-associated Kaposi's sarcoma in Zimbabwe: Results of a randomized quality of life focused clinical trial
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Kaposi's sarcoma is currently the most common tumor in Zimbabwe. The purpose of our study is to compare the effectiveness of supportive care vs. 3 intervention approaches, namely oral Etoposide, a 3-drug combination, and radiotherapy using quality of life (QOL) as the primary measure of success. In addition, our study was to determine whether a disease-specific module has greater sensitivity to group differences than a generic QOL questionnaire and to determine the most pragmatic approach to treating epidemic Kaposi's sarcoma (EKS) in Zimbabwe. Histologically confirmed HIV-positive patients with Kaposi's sarcoma were randomized to receive supportive care only or supportive care plus either radiotherapy, oral Etoposide or a 3-drug combination consisting of actinomycin-D, vincristine and bleomycin. No patient received antiretroviral therapy. The primary outcome was QOL measured by the functional living index-cancer (FLI-C) and supplemented by the Kaposi's sarcoma module (KSM). From 1994-1999, 495 EKS patients were accrued, and 470 were evaluable. Of these, 433 are known to be dead, 26 are lost to follow-up and 11 are still alive. The group treated with oral Etoposide had a significantly better QOL than the radiotherapy group for the total FLI-C score (adjusted mean plus standard error at 3-months 89 +/- 3 vs. 76 +/- 3; p = 0.004) and for the hardship (11 +/- 0.4 vs. 9 +/- 0.4; p = 0.001); social (10 +/- 0.4 vs. 8 +/- 0.4; p = 0.001) and nausea (9 +/- 0.4 vs. 8 +/- 0.4; p = 0.002) subscales. In addition, on the physical and psychological subscales, the Etoposide group had a significantly better QOL than the other 3 treatment groups (p < 0.04). The 3-drug combination, supportive care and radiotherapy groups did not differ significantly from each other with respect to the total FLI-C score or its subscales. There were no group differences with respect to survival. Oral Etoposide therapy resulted in better total FLI-C QOL score than radiotherapy. As well, Etoposide resulted in better physical and psychological subscale scores than radiotherapy, 3-drugs and supportive care. Thus, funds permitting, oral Etoposide is a pragmatic approach to treating EKS in an environment where antiretroviral drugs are not universally available. The study underscores the value of undertaking studies in areas of disease prevalence and the necessity of selecting appropriate outcome measures.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Direct model labels (unvalidated)
Per-model category and study-design labels from the labeling rounds. They are machine output, unvalidated, and the disagreement between models ships as data. No study design here is MEDLINE-validated yet.
| Model arm | Categories | Study design | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| gemma | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Randomized trial | low |
| gpt | no category Domain: not available · Genre: Empirical About the Canadian research system: no · About a Canadian topic: no | Randomized trial | high |
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedLabeled directly by 2 models reading the full record.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".