Maintenance chemotherapy in 43 patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer: a retrospective study.

It is unclear that patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) should receive prolonged chemotherapy or the best support, after achieving a maximum tumor response with 4 to 6 initial chemotherapy cycles. The aim of this study is to compare maintenance paclitaxel therapy with observatio...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Zhongguo fei ai za zhi 2008-06, Vol.11 (3), p.431-434
Main Authors: Liu, Zhenqian, Chen, Wei, Feng, Huasong
Format: Article
Language:Chinese
Subjects:
Chemotherapy
Lung cancer
Lung neoplasms
Outcome
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:It is unclear that patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) should receive prolonged chemotherapy or the best support, after achieving a maximum tumor response with 4 to 6 initial chemotherapy cycles. The aim of this study is to compare maintenance paclitaxel therapy with observation in advanced NSCLC patients. A total of 166 patients with stage IIIB or IV NSCLC were treated with four monthly paclitaxel-carboplatin as following: paclitaxel 100 mg/m(2) weekly for 3 of 4 weeks with carboplatin (area under the curve[AUC]=6) on day 1. Patients who responded at week 16 were assigned to either weekly paclitaxel therapy(70 mg/m(2), 3 of 4 weeks) or observation. Maintenance therapy continued until disease progression, development of intercurrent illness, intolerable toxicity, or investigator decision to terminate treatment. There was a longer median time to progression in maintenance therapy compared with observation (P< 0.05). One- and two-year survival rates were 65% and 24% in the paclitaxel arm a
ISSN:1009-3419
1999-6187
DOI:10.3779/j.issn.1009-3419.2008.03.014