Author(s)

Ahmed Ashour Badawy^1*, Abbas Omar¹, Waleed Arafat¹, Gehan Khedr¹, Sejong Bae², Stefan Grant³

¹Clinical Oncology and Nuclear Medicine Department, University of Alexandria Faculty of Medicine, Alexandria, Egypt.
²Preventive Medicine Division, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, AL, USA.
³Hematology oncology Division, Wake Forest University Comprehensive Cancer Center, Winston Salem, NC, USA.

Background: Randomized clinical trials have demonstrated the benefits of chemotherapy in carefully selected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients. How generalizable these results are to other NSCLC patients is unresolved. Methods: The outcomes of patients treated with standard chemotherapy regimens (paclitaxel / carboplatin; gemcitabine / carboplatin; pemetrexed / carboplatin; paclitaxel / carboplatin / bevacizumab) off study as first line therapy between 2002 and 2012 at our institution were compared to the reported results of trials supporting the FDA approval of these drugs and/or regimens. Results: In our population, 38.1% of the patients had hypertension, 11.9% of the patients were diabetic, 23.7% had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), 11.9% had coronary artery disease (CAD) and 2.1% had renal or liver disease. Notably, the presence of a single or multiple comorbidities was associated with low overall survival compared to matched patients with no comorbidities (p = 0.007). Conclusion: The presence of single or multiple comorbidities is associated with inferior overall survival compared to matched groups without such pre-existing conditions.

NSCLC-Lung Cancer Chemotherapy-Comorbidities

Badawy, A. , Omar, A. , Arafat, W. , Khedr, G. , Bae, S. and Grant, S. (2018) A Retrospective Evaluation of Chemotherapy Regimens in Unselected Patients with Metastatic Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer. Journal of Cancer Therapy, 9, 314-322. doi: 10.4236/jct.2018.93029.