Maintenance Therapy in Ovarian Cancer with Targeted Agents Improves PFS and OS: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

open access

 The articles included in our analysis were published between 2006 and 2014; thus, they provided relatively new data.

Background

Maintenance therapy with targeted agents for prolonging remission for ovarian cancer patients remains controversial. As a result, a meta-analysis was conducted to assess the effectiveness and safety of using maintenance therapy with targeted agents for the treatment of ovarian cancer.

....Almost half of the trials that were included in our meta-analysis were high-quality phase III RCTs. Furthermore, the majority of them were conducted in the United States, and the remaining were conducted in various European countries. Many of the trials included in our analysis were conducted by representative multi-center tumor cooperative groups, such as the Gynecologic Oncology Group, the Canada Clinical Trials Group Study, and the European Organization for Research and Treatment of Cancer-Gynecological Cancer Group (EORTC-GCG). However, more than half of the included trials had relatively small sample sizes with respect to the targeted maintenance therapy groups. As inherent limitations and inconsistent conclusions were found among previous trials, it was therefore necessary for us to synthesize as many trials as possible to obtain the most credible evidence.....