Krebswissenschaft und -therapie

Treatment and Outcome of Patients with Palliative Non-small Cell Lung Cancer (NSCLC) in Routine Outpatient Care Over Two Decades

Abstract

Geothy Chakupurakal, Stefan Feiten, Vera Friesenhahn, Jochen Heymanns, Kristina Kleboth, Hubert Köppler, Julia Lutschkin, Jörg Thomalla, Christoph van Roye and Rudolf Weide

Objectives: We evaluated the practice in our outpatient setting to analyze and study the outcomes of patients with palliative lung cancer.
Methods: All consecutive patients with palliative non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) treated between June 1995 and December 2016 were analyzed retrospectively.
Results: 736 patients with a median age of 66 (37-88) could be evaluated. All patients had a primary lesion in the lung and 71% metastatic disease at the time of presentation. Adenocarcinoma (61%) was the most common histological subtype followed by squamous cell cancer (28%). The majority (93%) received at least one line of chemotherapy. A mean of 2.5 lines of treatment per patient (1-11) was delivered with platin doublet chemotherapy being the most common therapeutic choice (479/650; 74%). 93% of patients died, mostly due to tumor (76%) during the observation period.. The median overall survival (OS) was 13.5 months (0.4-194.6). Patients with disease limited to the lungs without metastases had an OS of 16.9 months (1.2–188.5+) compared with 11.6 months (0.4-194.6) for patients with metastases (p=0.003).
Conclusions: Good quality care can be delivered closer to home in an outpatient setting with the help of a competent multidisciplinary framework. Our results are comparable to that of clinical trial and cancer registry data.