ISSN:
1468-3083
Source:
Blackwell Publishing Journal Backfiles 1879-2005
Topics:
Medicine
Notes:
Chemotherapy and immunotherapy are treatments currently employed in advanced melanoma, but responses obtained are poor, and metastatic melanoma patients with visceral localization rarely survive for more than 6 months. Thus, different therapeutic regimens are used in metastatic melanoma and no standardized therapy exists so far.〈section xml:id="abs1-3"〉〈title type="main"〉MethodsWe report a retrospective survival study involving 80 patients with metastatic melanoma who were treated either with chemotherapy [dacarbazine (DTIC) alone or DTIC in monotherapeutic or polychemotherapeutic regimen] or immunochemotherapy [interferon (IFN)-α at low doses added to chemotherapy]. Survival of patients was statistically evaluated in an actuarial curve taking into account as predictive variables sex, age, marital status, site of primary tumour, histological type, Clark level, sites of metastases, and the different therapeutic regimens (i.e. DTIC alone, DTIC plus IFN-α, or others, with or without IFN-α).〈section xml:id="abs1-4"〉〈title type="main"〉ResultsSite of primary melanoma, histological type, Clark level and therapy regimen appeared to exhibit a prognostic significance in survival; when a multivariate analysis was performed to obtain a mutual adjustment of survival values for each variable, only the therapeutic regimen was found to be significant as an independent prognostic variable. Patients treated with immunochemotherapy, i.e. DTIC plus IFN-α, showed a probability of dying of 0.41 (95% confidence interval 0.2–0.8) compared with patients treated with DTIC alone.〈section xml:id="abs1-5"〉〈title type="main"〉ConclusionsIn our study immunochemotherapy, comprised of DTIC plus IFN-α at low doses, was associated with a significantly longer survival of patients, in comparison with chemotherapy comprised of only DTIC.
Type of Medium:
Electronic Resource
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1046/j.1468-3083.2001.00197.x
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