Symptom clusters in patients with advanced prostate cancer.

e20647 Background: Numerous studies have evaluated the relationship among patient reported symptoms in many types of cancer, but only one study has focused on patients with early stage prostate cancer. No research has been performed to identify symptom clusters in patients with advanced prostate cancer or has used clinician reported adverse event data. Methods: The adverse event data from a randomized clinical trial conducted by SWOG comparing Docetaxel plus Estramustine versus Mitoxantrone plus Predinsone in patients with advanced prostate cancer were utilized to identify symptom clusters. A variable-based hierarchical cluster analysis was conducted using the CTCAE for the 323 patients who reported at least one grade 3 or higher toxicity. Clusters were formed such that symptoms within a cluster were more similar and those from different clusters were more dissimilar. The aggregation criterion was the decrease in homogeneity of the clusters, measured as the sum of the correlation between symptoms. Results...