Cardiopulmonary Exercise Testing: An Assessment of Patients Fitness for Palliative Chemotherapy for Pancreatic Cancer

Chemotherapy is widely used to treat a variety of cancers, and is associated with significant complications and even death. The established method for assessing patient fitness is by developing a clinical assessment of patient fitness, and classifying this using a performance status tool. Pancreatic Cancer patients with poorer performance status have been shown to have lower median survival of just 4 months. There is also evidence that patients with poorer performance status have lower response rates to other chemotherapy, higher complication rates, shorter progression free and overall survival. In clinical practice patients with performance status 2 are often offered chemotherapy, even though there is little evidence of its benefit, as the numbers of patients included in clinical trials with PS 2 is low and benefits from chemotherapy appear to be more modest.

Cardiopulmonary exercise testing is a non-invasive test that allows quantification of fitness. It is an objective measure of function capacity/fitness. It has been used in patients due to undergo major surgical intervention, and has the ability to identify those patients who are at higher risk of complications and mortality. CPET has been shown to be superior to the ASA in predicting peri-operative risk. The ASA classification is similar to PS in that it is graded from 1-4, and is a bedside assessment.

Despite the ability of PS to predict outcome it is a fairly blunt tool. The WHO PS is the most commonly used and is graded from 0-4. The categories are broad, for example a WHO PS of 0 could refer to a marathon runner or an elderly patient who is normally relatively inactive. Differentiating between grades is subject to observer error. There is reasonably good agreement between clinicians when differentiating between WHO grade 0-2 and 3-4, however variability exists within these subsets.

More recently it has been noted that it is harder to clinically assess older patients, and there is concern that many fit older patients are not being offered appropriate treatment. This is the subject of a current Department of Health (DoH) equality initiative.

The investigators are interested in identifying whether (CPET) offers additional benefit over that of WHO PS in the assessment of patients fitness for palliative chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer, by identifying those patients who might survive longer and tolerate chemotherapy better, thus predicting their outcome. The CPET variables most commonly used in risk prediction models are the volume of oxygen taken up at the anaerobic threshold relative to body mass (maximal oxygen consumption,VO2 at anaerobic threshold (AT)), the Peak oxygen uptake achieved during the exercise test relative to body mass (VO2 peak) and the oxygen pulse (O2 pulse) which is a derivative value involving oxygen uptake and the heart rate.

The benefit of CPET will be determined by the following:

• Overall survival at 6 months
• Response Rate (Response Evaluation Criteria In Solid Tumors criteria (RECIST) version 1.1)
• 60 day all-cause mortality
• Grade 3 and above adverse events (CTCAE v4) related to chemotherapy
• Chemotherapy dose intensity (% of planned doses given)
• Progression free survival (RECIST criteria version 1.1)
• European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) quality of Life questionnaires (QLQ): to assess quality of life of cancer patients (QLQC30 (version 3)) and participants with pancreatic cancer (QLQ-PAN26)and a health survey 36 questionnaire (RAND 36-item short form health survey 1.0).
• Overall survival