Apalutamide efficacy, safety and wellbeing in older patients with advanced prostate cancer from Phase 3 randomised clinical studies TITAN and SPARTAN

Background Apalutamide plus androgen-deprivation therapy (ADT) improved outcomes in metastatic castration-sensitive prostate cancer (mCSPC) and non-metastatic castration-resistant PC (nmCRPC) in the Phase 3 randomised TITAN and SPARTAN studies, respectively, and maintained health-related quality of life (HRQoL). Apalutamide treatment effect by patient age requires assessment. Methods Post-hoc analysis assessed patients receiving 240 mg/day apalutamide (525 TITAN and 806 SPARTAN) or placebo (527 TITAN and 401 SPARTAN) with ongoing ADT, stratified by age groups. Prostate-specific antigen declines, radiographic progression-free survival, metastasis-free survival, overall survival (OS), HRQoL and safety were assessed using descriptive statistics, Kaplan-Meier method, Cox proportional-hazards model and mixed-effects model for repeated measures. Results Hazard ratios (95% confidence intervals) generally favoured apalutamide plus ADT versus ADT alone across all endpoints regardless of age; e.g., OS values were 0.57 (0.40–0.80), 0.70 (0.54–0.91) and 0.74 (0.40–1.39) (TITAN) and 0.39 (0.19–0.78), 0.89 (0.69–1.16) and 0.81 (0.58–1.15) (SPARTAN) in patients aged <65, 65–79 and ≥80 years. Regardless of age, apalutamide also maintained HRQoL and was tolerated well with a potential trend in rates of adverse events increasing with age. Limitations include post-hoc nature and variability in sample size of age groups. Conclusions Apalutamide plus ADT was an effective and well-tolerated option maintaining HRQoL in patients with mCSPC and nmCRPC regardless of age. Clinical trial registration TITAN (NCT02489318); SPARTAN (NCT01946204).