Randomized trial comparing induction chemotherapy versus induction chemotherapy followed by maintenance chemotherapy in small-cell lung cancer. European Lung Cancer Working Party.

Abstract

We conclude that maintenance chemotherapy in responding patients is beneficial in SCLC.

Outpatient treatment with epirubicin and oral etoposide in patients with small-cell lung cancer

“…Variable doses of anthracycline, either doxorubicin (45 mg m-2) or epirubicin (60 mg m-2 or 90 mg m-2), given on day 1 with ifosfamide (1.5 g m-2) and etoposide (80 mg m-2) day 1-3, resulted in response rates varying from 73% to 83% (Sculier et al, 1995). The overall median survival was 42 weeks, which is very similar to our own results.…”

“…The combination of epirubicin and etoposide has been tested in several phase II trials but always in addition to other drugs, such as cyclophosphamide (Macchiarini et al, 1990b), cisplatin (Rosell et al, 1992), ifosfamide (Sculier et al, 1995) or in four drug regimens (Bamberga et al, 1992).…”

Maintenance or consolidation therapy in small-cell lung cancer: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…A total of 21 studies met the inclusion criteria: 11 RCTs concerning maintenance chemotherapy [26][27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36] (Table 1); 4 RCTs with maintenance interferon-alpha [37][38][39][40] and 2 with interferongamma [41,42] (Table 2); 4 employing maintenance therapy with other biological agents [43][44][45][46] (Table 3). Fig.…”

“…effects or toxic death or patient's refusal to proceed ( Table 5). The data were not available because not specified in the text for 7 trials [27,29,31,33,40,45,46]. The higher percentage of patients stopping maintenance therapy due to toxicity was reported with interferons and the other biological agents.…”

“…All studies were randomized, but allocation concealment was adequate only for 5 studies [19,33,41,42,45] and for two [36,40] data were not available. In only three trials blinding was performed [43,45,46], in all the others this was not done.…”