Prognostic variables in patients with advanced colorectal cancer treated with fluorouracil and leucovorin-based chemotherapy

Factors predicting survival in stage IV colorectal carcinoma patients after palliative treatment: A multivariate analysis

“…In these studies, performance status emerged as an essential independent predictive factor [24][25][26][27][28][29]31]. Only series that were based on randomized protocols did not show that performance status is a significant predictor of survival, that is very likely because patients in a poor condition were excluded from those protocols [32,35]. Our results confirm the predictive importance of performance status and ASA-class for survival in an unselected patient population.…”

“…The importance of CEA as a predictor of survival is controversially discussed. While there are many studies that showed a clear relationship [27][28][29]34,35], we also found reports that could not confirm a significant influence on survival [25,30,32,33]. Apparently its predictive importance regarding survival depends on the patient group and the set of laboratory tests investigated.…”

“…Regarding prognostic factors, all other multivariate studies combined either stage IV and locally unresectable cancer [17,[25][26][27][28][29] or synchronous and metachronous metastases [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35], and often focused solely on patients with liver secondaries only [24,30,[32][33][34]. On account of the great differences in study design and patient populations it is difficult to evaluate the results of these studies for patients with incurable synchronous metastatic disease.…”

Prognostic significance of Subjective Global Assessment (SGA) in advanced colorectal cancer

“…Several studies have reported the prognostic significance of LDH in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer (Chang et al, 1989;Kemeny et al, 1989;Steinberg et al, 1992;Fountzilas et al, 1996). Indeed, one study (Kemeny & Braun, 1983) described the importance of LDH as an independent predictor of survival in advanced colorectal carcinoma.…”

Natural killer (NK) cell function is a strong prognostic factor in colorectal carcinoma patients treated with the monoclonal antibody 17‐1A

“…The known prognostic factors were included in univariate and multivariate regression analyses. Since all patients had a Karnofsky index of at least 80% (corresponding to an ECOG performance scale of 0–1), performance status was not included as a prognostic factor 25, 26. Univariate analysis related to OS and PFS was performed for each variable and comparisons performed with the log‐rank test or Cox regression.…”