Association of Patient Comorbid Conditions With Cancer Clinical Trial Participation

The American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO), Friends of Cancer Research, and the US Food and Drug Administration recently recommended modernizing criteria related to comorbidities routinely used to exclude patients from cancer clinical trials. The goal was to design clinical trial eligibility such that trial results better reflect real-world cancer patient populations, to improve clinical trial participation, and to increase patient access to new treatments in trials. Yet despite the assumed influence of comorbidities on trial participation, the relationship between patients' comorbidity profile at diagnosis and trial participation has not been explicitly examined using patient-level data.