Results
A total of 36 patients, of which 28 were female, were included in the Deventer Teaching Hospital (n=20) and Radboud University Medical Centre (n=16). Docetaxel data of eight subjects were not evaluated: in six patients blood was taken in the infusion arm and two patients refrained from blood sampling. Another two patients were lost to follow-up for toxicity data. Figure 1 shows a flowchart of the included patients.
Patient characteristics, the main demographic, anthropometric, body composition and docetaxel pharmacokinetic parameters in males, females, and in the whole study population are shown in Table 1. Females had significantly lower median age when compared with males (56 [12.9] vs. 69.6 [16.3], p = 0.024). This is probably because docetaxel is given primarily for women with breast cancer which are mostly diagnosed at a younger age than CRPC in men. Another significant difference concern a lower LBM of females than of men (45.7 [8.4] vs. 54.5 [7.7], p = 0.017) in accordance with literature data.16,31 None of the pharmacokinetic parameters differed between males and females, except for dose (females 140 [20] vs. males 160 [18], p = 0.040) and dose/LBM (females 3.09 [0.3] vs. males 2.80 [0.2], p=0.020).