Long-term survivors in advanced non-small cell lung cancer treated sequentially with cytostatic drugs and erlotinib: A retrospective study

Abstract

Abstract Objectives: This retrospective study analyzed long-term survivor patients with advanced nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) stage IIIB and IV with the aim to find the common characteristics of this group of patients. Materials and Methods: Clinical records of 76 long-term survivor patients with advanced NSCLC who took over three series of chemotherapy and had Erlotinib in one therapeutic lines. The main criterion for selection for this study was survival over 2 years. We sought to establish some features of long-term survivors, survival according to the number of lines of chemotherapy, survival by administration of Erlotinib. The Student t-test was used for calculation of P value when the data allowed this calculation and Kaplan Mayer curve was used for survival calculation. Discussions and conclusions: Relatively small number of patients cannot afford to obtain results with a high confidence interval and very heterogeneous patient characteristics were not in the favor of the creation a prototype of long-term survivors. We have found that the trend of longer survival of our patients with advanced NSCLC may be due to using multiple lines of chemotherapy and Erlotinib in the treatment strategy for these patients. Some of our conclusions are similar to other retrospective study.