This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.
PORT failed to improve survival of elderly patients with advanced lung cancer
Wisnivesky JP. Cancer. 2012;doi:10.1002/cncr.26585.
Click Here to Manage Email Alerts
Elderly patients with stage III lung cancer assigned to radiotherapy after surgery did not enjoy a survival advantage compared with patients who did not undergo radiotherapy, according to results from a retrospective analysis of SEER data.
Researchers looked at data collected on 1,307 patients who had primary, completely resected non–small cell lung cancer with N2 lymph node involvement diagnosed from 1992 to 2005. Propensity score analysis on 710 patients who underwent postoperative radiotherapy (PORT) showed there was no survival benefit associated with the treatment (HR=1.11; 95% CI, 0.97-1.27).
“While some analyses have shown improvement with PORT, the data are not strong enough to support using it as a standard-of-care in older adults with this type of young cancer,” study researcher Juan Wisnivesky, MD, DrPH, vice chair for research in the department of medicine at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, said in a press release. “Our results show that we need more information about the potential benefits of radiation therapy before it is used routinely to treat these patients.”
“Secondary analyses adjusting for the receipt of adjuvant chemotherapy or limiting the sample to patients who did or did not receive postoperative chemotherapy, or with intermediate-complexity and high-complexity [radiotherapy planning] also showed that PORT was not associated with improved survival (HR, 1.06-1.25),” the researchers wrote. “The association between PORT use and survival remained unchanged when analyses were repeated adjusting for potential time trends in the use of other lung cancer treatments.”
Further analysis demonstrated that PORT was associated with a slight decrease on 1-year OS and no significant difference in 3-year OS.
 |
Follow HemOncToday.com on Twitter. |