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.
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