Elinzanetant's Impact on Menopause Quality of Life: JoAnn Pinkerton, MD

Patient-reported outcome measures demonstrate the impact of elinzanetant on a patient's overall quality of life, specifically in areas meaningful to patients with hot flashes, such as sleep disruption and menopause-related quality of life, explained JoAnn V. Pinkerton, MD, the Mamie A. Jessup Professor of Obstetrics and Gynecology and division director of the Midlife Health Center at the University of Virginia and past president of The Menopause Society.

The dual NK-1/NK-3 receptor antagonist offers a potentially effective and safe nonhormonal option for women who cannot or choose not to take hormone therapy.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions are auto-generated.

Transcript

How do the results of patient-reported outcome measures demonstrate elinzanetant's value? What is the impact on a patient's overall quality of life?

The patient-reported outcome measures give us this unique information on the impact of a medical condition and its treatment from the patient's perspective, and they actually picked areas of clinically relevant issues from focus groups that were meaningful to the patients. For elinzanetant, it was measures of sleep disruption and menopause-related quality of life.

What we know is that hot flushes, when they are severe, have an impact on women's daily lives, and if improved, elinzanetant would provide health care providers with this new option that would not only treat the hot flushes, but was shown in the clinical studies to have improvement in sleep disruption and menopause-related quality of life. That's important because women’s quality of life is impacted by your ability to work, your relationships at work and at home, and your productivity. Being more productive is going to help women.

With existing nonhormonal options available, how do you see elinzanetant's efficacy and safety profile positioning it in the treatment landscape? Are there subgroups of patients who might benefit most if it is approved?

Hormone therapy is the most effective treatment for hot flushes, but not all women can take it or choose to take it. Some of them have contraindications to taking hormone therapy, such as heart attack, stroke, blood clot, or estrogen-sensitive cancers, usually breast cancer or endometrial cancer. These women need effective, tested, and safe therapies that are FDA approved, and what has been available to date has been either not FDA approved or not easily available or have some tolerability issues. I think it's exciting that elinzanetant may offer a really safe, tested, effective therapy for women who choose not to take hormone therapy.