A large clinical test shows that giving chemotherapy directly into
the stomach, as well as into a vein, can improve survival of women with
advanced ovarian cancer by about sixteen months. The results of the
study, which pop up in this week’s issue of the New England Journal of
Medicine, prompted the National Cancer Institute to issue a statement
supporting doctors to employ this plan of attack for appropriate
patients.
Why is this new treatment reigmine so important? Ovarian cancer is the
fourth greatest reason of cancer demises in women, affecting more than
22,000 women and killing more than 16,000 in 2005. Although this disease
is super treatable when saw ahead of time, virtually all cases are not
noticed until they have dispersed beyond the ovaries. Because so many
ovarian cancer patients are diagnosed at a later stage, it is crucial to
find ways to better treatments for further progressed disease.
What is already known about ovarian cancer? virtually all women with
advanced ovarian cancer get chemotherapy after surgery to get rid of the
tumor. That chemotherapy is usually given into a vein and moves through
the bloodstream to reach tumor cells in the stomach. Doctors have also
experimented with rendering the chemotherapy straight into the abdomen
through a catheter, a system called intraperitoneal (IP) chemotherapy.
Eight clinical trials of this approach have been done, and most showed a
gain to IP chemotherapy. But this technique is not widely wore,
according to the study’s author, Deborah Armstrong, MD.
“There has been a prejudice against IP therapy in ovarian cancer because
it’s an old idea, it requires skill and experience for the surgery and
for the chemotherapy, and it’s additional complicated than IV
chemotherapy,” said Armstrong, who is a medical oncologist and associate
professor at the John Hopkins Kimmel Cancer Center in Baltimore.
How this study was done: Women with stage III ovarian cancer were
randomly assigned to get either standard chemotherapy in a vein (210
women), or a combination of chemotherapy in a vein and IP chemotherapy
(205 women). The women had already had surgery that successfully removed
all or most of the tumor; none had tumors remaining that were larger
than 1 cm in diameter. All the women were treated with the same drugs,
cisplatin and paclitaxel. Six cycles of chemotherapy were planned for
both groups.
What was found? Women who had IP chemo operated long without their
cancer coming back and lived longest overall. Women who had traditional
chemotherapy in a vein survived about 4 years after treatment, while
those who got chemotherapy in the stomach as well as a vein stomach an
median of nearly 5
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