Trial reportInternational journal of radiation oncology, biology, physics2025
"Hope" Drives Quality of Life in Patients With Brain Metastases, But, the "Hope Center" Remains Elusive: An Analysis of NRG-CC003.
Trial report in International journal of radiation oncology, biology, physics, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 2 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
2 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Five-Decade Journey of Small Cell Lung Cancer.Cancer communications (London, England) · 2026Review
- Immunotherapy for Limited-Stage Small Cell Lung Cancer: Innovative Treatments and Future Perspectives.Cancer control : journal of the Moffitt Cancer CenterReview
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
21 authors.
Funding
Abstract
purposeNRG-CC003 randomized 393 patients with small cell lung cancer to prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI) with or without hippocampal avoidance (HA). "Hopefulness" is a cognitive construct with 3 components: goals, pathways, and agency. Hope is measurable with validated instruments. Since hope is cognitive in nature, the existence of a "hope center" in the brain-most likely in the hippocampus-has been hypothesized. One exploratory objective of NRG-CC003 posited that if hope levels were better maintained in patients randomized to PCI + HA, then the hippocampus would be implicated in the mechanism of hopefulness. METHODS AND MATERIALS: PCI consisted of 10 fractions of 2.5 Gy. The Adult Hope Scale (AHS) was administered at time-zero and at 6 months. Regarding patient-reported outcome measures, the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) Quality of Life Questionnaire (QLQ)-C30 was administered at baseline and at 3, 6-, 12-, 18- and 24-month intervals. Comparisons of AHS scores by arm were made using Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney tests, and correlation of AHS with EORTC QLQ-C30 by Pearson correlation coefficients.
resultsApproximately 95% completed the AHS at baseline and 67% filled out the questionnaire at 6 months paralleling the completion rates of the conventional tools for QOL and neurocognition. When comparing hope levels (change from baseline to 6 months) there was no significant difference (P > .05) between the 2 arms of the trial. There was a correlation for the components of hopefulness with QOL; specifically, between change in agency score and QLQ-C30 global health status (ρ = 0.27, P < .0001) as well as between change in pathways score and QLQ-C30 global health status (ρ = 0.16, P = .022).
conclusionsIt is feasible to study hopefulness in the context of prospective trials conducted within the National Clinical Trials Network. The hippocampus could not be implicated as a critical structure in a central pathway that coordinates hopefulness. For the first time, validated tools established a relationship between hope and quality of life among cancer patients.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.