Treatment of metastatic non-small cell lung cancer. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Although the overall survival rates for patients with metastatic non-small cell lung cancer have not changed in the past two decades, meta-analytic studies have confirmed that a modest increase in mean survival time can be gained with platinum-based combination chemotherapy. With appropriate selection of patients, chemotherapy will have symptomatic benefits in more than 60% of patients, and concerns regarding the costs of chemotherapy will be lessened by the observation that in some instances chemotherapy is less costly than best supportive care. Until the end of the 1980s, apart from the few active agents and their analogues no new drugs became available, but in the past 5 years several new agents have shown promising results and are now being included in combination programs. Large-scale comparative studies, looking for the combination with the best therapeutic index, are awaited with great interest. The number of patients with non-small cell lung cancer is so great that even modest improvements in therapy will have a great impact on survival rates.

publication date

  • March 1, 1996

Research

keywords

  • Antineoplastic Agents
  • Carcinoma, Non-Small-Cell Lung
  • Lung Neoplasms
  • Taxoids

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0029936052

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1097/00001622-199603000-00008

PubMed ID

  • 8727304

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 8

issue

  • 2