How Timing of Chemotherapy After SCLC Diagnosis Affects Survival

The timing of chemotherapy given to patients with small cell lung cancer (SCLC) does not have a statistically significant effect on OS, said Faruk Tas and colleagues, despite previous research showing that a delay of treatment may lead to adverse patient outcomes.

To evaluate the clinical significance between the start of chemotherapy and patient outcomes, the team of researchers from Turkey reviewed 323 cases of patients with SCLC. They used the median value of the patients’ time to treatment as the cutoff value in distinguishing between early and late chemotherapy. The median range of the time interval between the pathological diagnosis and the initiation of chemotherapy was 18 days.

Performance status was the only clinical variable that the researchers found to be significantly associated with the time from diagnosis to initiation of chemotherapy. Compared with other patients, patients with poor prognostic factors received chemotherapy earlier (18.9% vs 32.9%, respectively). Patients with SCLC who had poor prognostic factors started chemotherapy 14.5 days after diagnosis versus 19.0 days for patients who did not have them.

Although the researchers found that patients who were treated earlier with chemotherapy had shorter survival, there was no statistically significant difference in OS according to the timing of chemotherapy administration (P=.08).

Since there are varying results about timing of chemotherapy in patients with SCLC, more standardized definitions and guides for calculation of the time interval between diagnosis and treatment are needed to better understand the delays in treatment, the researchers said.