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Background: Patient-reported outcomes (PROs) are validated tools to assess the impact of efficacy and toxicities of cancer treatments on patients' health status. Because of the demonstrated little reliability of humans in reporting memories of painful experiences, this work explores the reliability of cancer patients in reporting chemotherapy-related toxicities., Aim: This study aims to evaluate the concordance between toxicities experienced by the patients during chemotherapy and toxicities reported to the doctor at the end of the cycles., Methods: Questionnaires concerning chemotherapy-related toxicities were administered on days 2, 5, 8, 11, 14, and 17 of each chemo cycle and at the end of the same cycle to patients undergoing adjuvant chemotherapy. The co-primary end-points were Lins's concordance correlation coefficient (CCC) and mean difference between real-time and retrospective toxicity assessments., Results: In total, 7182 toxicity assessments were collected from 1096 questionnaires. Concordance was observed between the retrospective evaluations and the toxicity assessments at early (day 2), peak (maximum toxicity), late (day 14 or 17), and mean real-time evaluations for each chemotherapy cycle (CCC for mean ranging from 0.52 to 0.77). No systematic discrepancy was found between real-time and retrospective evaluations, except for peak, which was systematically underestimated retrospectively., Conclusions: Toxicities reported by the patients to the doctor at the end of each chemotherapy cycle reflect what they actually experienced without any substantial distortion. This result is very relevant both for the clinical implications in daily patients' management and in the light of the current growing impact on digital monitoring of PROs., Competing Interests: Conflict of interest statement The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Background: NGR-hTNF consists of human tumour necrosis factor (hTNF) fused with the tumour-homing peptide Asp-Gly-Arg (NGR), which is able to selectively bind an aminopeptidase N overexpressed on tumour blood vessels. Preclinical antitumour activity was observed even at low doses. We evaluated the activity and safety of low-dose NGR-hTNF in colorectal cancer (CRC) patients failing standard therapies., Patients and Methods: Thirty-three patients with progressive disease at study entry received NGR-hTNF 0.8 μg/m(2) given intravenously every 3 weeks. The median number of prior treatment regimens was three (range, 2-5). One-quarter of patients had previously received four or more regimens and two-thirds targeted agents. Progression-free survival (PFS) was the primary study objective., Results: NGR-hTNF was well tolerated. No treatment-related grade 3 to 4 toxicities were detected, most common grade 1 to 2 adverse events being short-lived, infusion-time related chills (50.0%). One partial response and 12 stable diseases were observed, yielding a disease control rate of 39.4% (95% CI, 22.9-57.8%). Median PFS and overall survival were 2.5 months (95% CI, 2.1-2.8) and 13.1 months (95% CI, 8.9-17.3), respectively; whereas in patients who achieved disease control the median PFS and overall survival were 3.8 and 15.4 months, respectively. In an additional cohort of 13 patients treated at same dose with a weekly schedule, there was no increased toxicity and 2 patients experienced PFS longer than 10 months., Conclusion: Based on tolerability and preliminary evidence of disease control in heavily pretreated CRC patients, NGR-hTNF deserves further evaluation in combination with standard chemotherapy., (Copyright © 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)