Treatment Strategies

Advanced disease (stage IV)

Quality of Life in advanced NSCLC

Advanced, recurrent or refractory NSCLC is essentially incurable. As anticancer therapy can have a dramatic effect on QoL, this is rapidly becoming an increasingly important consideration for both clinical trial design and clinical practice.¹ To illustrate this point, one study asked patients with advanced NSCLC, who had already received cisplatin-based therapy, to assess the trade-off between the survival benefits of further chemotherapy and its side effects.² For chemotherapy that provided mild side effects an increased survival of 4.5 months was acceptable, whereas if severe toxicity was predicted, patients expected to receive at least a 9-month increase in survival. When given the choice between best supportive care and chemotherapy, only 22% chose chemotherapy if it would extend survival by 3 months. By comparison, 68% would choose chemotherapy if it substantially reduced symptoms without extending life-expectancy. It is clear from such studies that any treatment that is able to provide symptom relief or improvement and can be administered with minimum intervention or side effects, will represent a major advance for advanced cancer patients who have a poor prognosis. This is one of the primary goals of the new generation of targeted therapies being developed for NSCLC.

Treatment Strategies

• Overview
• Early Stage
• Locally Advanced Stage
• Advanced Stage
  • Quality of Life
• Future Strategies