Chemotherapy Use Associated with Survival Benefit Among Medicare Patients with SCLC

the Oncology Nurse Advisor take:

Chemotherapy use was associated with a survival benefit for Medicare patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) treated in a real-world setting, a new study published online ahead of print in the journal Cancer has shown.

Because there have been limited therapeutic advances in the management of SCLC over the last three decades, researchers led by Madhusmita Behera, PhD, from the Department of Hematology and Medical Oncology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, sought to evaluate real-world trends in the use of systemic therapies and the impact on patient outcomes among patients with SCLC in the United States.

For the study, researchers analyzed data from 47,351 patients with SCLC diagnosed between 1985 and 2005 from the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER)–Medicare database. Among them, 52% were male, 87% were white, 7% were black, and 1.4% was Asian.

Results showed that the proportion of patients treated with chemotherapy increased from 38% between 1985 and 1990 to 53% between 2001 and 2005. Researchers found that females, Asians, and rural residents were more likely to receive chemotherapy.

In regard to survival benefit with chemotherapy, the median overall survival with and without chemotherapy was 9.6 months and 3.6 months, respectively.

The study demonstrated no survival difference between patients treated with carboplatin and patients treated with cisplatin; however, additional therapy beyond platinum-based chemotherapy was associated with a survival benefit.