This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Bevacizumab reduced risk for death and progression, but increased toxicity in NSCLC

Tassinari D. Oncology. 2011;doi:10.1159/000328781.

Issue: August 25, 2011

Add topic to email alerts

Receive an email when new articles are posted on

Please provide your email address to receive an email when new articles are posted on .

Subscribe

Added to email alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

You've successfully added to your alerts. You will receive an email when new content is published.

Click Here to Manage Email Alerts

Back to Healio

We were unable to process your request. Please try again later. If you continue to have this issue please contact customerservice@slackinc.com.

Back to Healio

Treatment with bevacizumab was associated with an absolute risk reduction for 1-year death and 6-month progression, but those improvements were accompanied by an increase in several serious adverse events, results of the ECOG-E4599 and AVAiL trials showed.

Researchers used a random effect model to conduct pooled analysis of the two trials. Results were then summarized as number-needed-to-treat and number-needed-to-harm. Patients in ECOG-E4599 were randomly assigned to paclitaxel (200 mg/m²) plus carboplatin (area under the curve 6) alone, or with 15 mg/kg bevacizumab (Avastin, Genentech/Roche). Patients in AVAiL were randomly assigned to 80 mg/m² cisplatin and gemcitabine (Gemzar, Eli Lilly) 1,250 mg/m² plus 7.5 mg/kg bevacizumab or 15 mg/kg bevacizumab or placebo.

There were 1,576 patients with advanced, chemotherapy-naive, non-squamous non–small cell lung cancer included in the primary analysis and 1,921 included in the secondary analysis. The primary analysis included only the patients treated with 15 mg/kg bevacizumab in the experimental arm, whereas the secondary, descriptive analysis included the patients treated with bevacizumab 15 mg/kg or those treated with 7.5 mg/kg bevacizumab in the experimental arm.

The absolute reduction in risk for 1-year death was 3.3% (95% CI, –6.5 to 13.2) with a number-needed-to-treat of 30. The absolute risk reduction for 6-month progression was 15.2% (95% CI, 0.07-29.6) with a number-needed-to-treat of six. The number-needed-to-treat favored bevacizumab in both cases.

The absolute risk for treatment-related death was 2.4% (95% CI, 0.8-3.9); 6.6% for hypertension (95% CI, 4.6-8.6); 2.1% for proteinuria (95% CI, 0.3-3.8); 7.3% for neutropenia (95% CI, 3.2-11.4); and 1.5% for thrombocytopenia (95% CI, 0.2-2.7).

Researchers did not observe a dose response in the efficacy and the safety analysis when all the patients treated with bevacizumab were included into the pooled analysis.

Follow HemOncToday.com on Twitter.