Survival for advanced stomach and oesophagael cancer patients increases by 40 per cent when treated with the chemotherapy drug, docetaxel – providing evidence to prescribe it as a second-line treatment.
Patients with the advanced disease, who do not respond to the initial standard treatment of platinum and fluoropyrimidine chemotherapy have very low survival – around four months.
These are contained in results of a study by Cancer Research UK, presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal cancers symposium on January 23, copied to the Ghana News Agency over the weekend.
The report said "in all, patients with advanced disease and most of those with early disease (70 per cent) their cancer will eventually progress further after chemotherapy."
It said, however, these new results show that patients taking docetaxel lived, on average, more than 40 per cent longer – 5.2 months compared with 3.6 months.
It said the drug improved symptoms, without affecting quality of life and it is a chemotherapy drug usually given to treat breast, prostate and non-small cell lung cancer.
The report said the Cambridge Cancer Trials Centre at Addenbrooke's hospital coordinated the trial, called COUGAR-02 and that 168 patients were recruited from 31 UK hospitals with incurable oesophageal or stomach cancer after initial therapy.
It said the patients were then randomly assigned either on chemotherapy for up to 18 weeks with docetaxel, or symptom-control treatment with no chemotherapy.
The report said each year more than 12,000 people die from oesophagus or stomach cancer in the United Kingdom, and added that stomach cancer is one of the most common cancers worldwide.