Blogger's Note: patient warning - this is not a 'good news' paper so caution advised
Table I
Patient Diagnoses, Gender, Median Age at Diagnosis and Median Number of Therapies (
Blogger's Note: total patients = 142; ovarian cancer patients = 11)
Patient Characteristics
"We reviewed the patient records of
165 unique patients that were evaluated for participation in six phase I
trials. Due to a lack of specific start/stop dates, 25 patients had at
least one treatment censored for analysis; with one of these patients
not having PFS that could be calculated for this study. Seventeen of
these twenty-five patients were diagnosed as having less than stage IV
disease, with the majority of censored treatments (radiation, surgery,
or neoadjuvant or adjuvant chemotherapy) occurring in the
non-advanced/metastatic setting. One hundred forty-four patients met
criteria for receiving at least one prior non-investigational systemic
therapy for advanced/metastatic cancer prior to coming for a phase I
treatment evaluation. There were 77 men and 65 women; median age at
cancer diagnosis was 55.3 years (range, 9.4 - 81.6 years). The most
common types were: colorectal cancer (n=20 (13.9%)), other
gastrointestinal cancer (n=17 (11.8%)), adenocarcinoma of the prostate
(n=17 (11.8%)), non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) (n=13 (9.0%)), breast
cancer (n=12 (8.3%)),
ovarian cancer (n=11 (7.6%)), and adenocarcinoma
of the pancreas (n=9 (6.3%)) (Table
I). Patients had a median of three chemotherapy or hormonal treatments (mean, 3.32 treatments; range, 1 - 11 treatments).
Two
of the 144 patients did not receive a second systemic therapy prior to
evaluation at our center, so PFS could be calculated for the remaining
142 patients. The PFS from tx
n to tx
n+3 was significantly decreased (p = 0.001850) (Figure
1).
Few advanced cancers have more than four lines of FDA-approved or
consensus guidelines recommendations for systemic therapy, thus we
examined the time to progression of the first five treatments (p =
2.938e-07) (Figure
2)."
