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Stopping chemotherapy may double colon cancer mortality
Source: (cancerfacts.com)
Saturday, April 29, 2006
NEW YORK – April 29, 2006 – New research has found that as many as 30 percent of patients with intermediate stage colon cancer prescribed six months of chemotherapy stop treatment prematurely.
Previous studies have shown that not completing chemotherapy regimens for breast cancer is associated with shorter survival. This is the first study to look at a link between mortality rates from colon cancer and treatment adherence.
Led by Dr. Alfred Neugut and Dr. Dawn Hershman, both of Columbia University Medical Center, the researchers looked at patients with stage III colon cancer who were receiving the standard combination chemotherapy regimen of 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin.
"The intuitive thinking is that if you complete most of a treatment regimen, you should get most of the treatment benefit," Neugut said in a prepared statement. "But these findings are significant because they indicate that completing treatment is as critical for colon cancer as it is for breast cancer – and we need to do better to ensure that patients who can, complete treatment as intended."
Research has shown that stopping chemotherapy for colon cancer prematurely is equivalent to receiving no treatment at all. This study will be published in the May 20, 2006 issue of the Journal of Clinical Oncology (published online last week).
The research team used the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results (SEER), the national cancer database, and the Medicare database to identify stage III colon cancer patients who were at least 65 years of age or older, and who received one to seven months of fluorouracil (FU)-based adjuvant chemotherapy treatment.
Among the 1,579 patients who survived eight months or longer, the 1,091 (69.1 percent) who underwent five to seven months of treatment survived nearly twice as long as the 488 (30.9 percent) who received only one to four months of treatment. Patients who were older, unmarried and had other illnesses, were more likely to receive less than five months of treatment.
The same research team previously published the first study to link treatment completion issues with race and poor survival rates in the Journal of Clinical Oncology (Sept. 20, 2005 issue).
That 2005 study found that black women with early stage breast cancer were more likely than their counterparts of other races to abandon chemotherapy before completing their full course of treatment. The findings shed new light on why black breast cancer patients experience lower survival rates than other women, despite a lower incidence.
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