Complementary Medicine Use Amongst Patients with Metastatic Cancer Enrolled in Phase III Clinical Trials
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Complementary medicines (CM) are frequently used by patients with cancer. Controversy exists over the effectiveness and risk that CM may add to conventional cancer therapy. The incidence of CM use among patients enrolled in phase III clinical trials is unknown. METHODS: Medication lists from 6 international phase III clinical trials were retrospectively reviewed to identify patients using CM. Patients had metastatic breast, colorectal, or lung cancers. Quality of life, adverse events, overall survival, and progression-free survival were compared between CM users and non-users. Baseline differences between groups were adjusted with propensity score matching groups. RESULTS: Seven hundred and six of 3446 patients (20.5%) used at least one CM. CM use was highest among patients with breast cancer (35.6%). CM users had more favorable baseline prognostic factors (ECOG 0-1, non-smoking status, younger age, and fewer metastases). CM use was associated with lower rates of adverse events (50% vs. 62%, P = .002) and quality of life was similar between both groups. After adjustment with propensity score matching, CM use was also associated with longer overall survival in patients with lung cancer (adjusted hazard ratio 0.80, 95%CI, 0.68-0.94, P =.0054). However, several key control variables like EGFR status were not available. CONCLUSION: One in 5 patients in phase III clinical trials report using CM. CM was not associated with worse cancer-specific outcomes. However, CM users had more favorable baseline prognostic factors, and likely other confounders that may have contributed to improved outcomes observed in the lung cohort. Physicians should monitor for CM use and potential interactions with clinical trial drugs.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
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 | 0.006 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".