The cancer and the treatments
- This is a difficult patient group where we still have a lot to go on in treatment. Several of the results seem very promising, says chief physician at St. Olav's hospital, Bjørn Henning Grønberg.
• Together with several of the country's foremost cancer doctors, researchers, pharmaceutical companies and professionals, he attends this year's ASCO conference in Chicago, USA. ASCO is held annually and is the world's largest cancer conference.
• One of the cancer diagnoses that gets a lot of attention during this year's conference is lung cancer.
• - It is obvious that immunotherapy gives better effect than chemotherapy alone and that giving immunotherapy as early as possible is important. This treatment offer should be extended to several patient groups based on what we have seen in studies, says head of Norwegian lung cancer group and cancer doctor, Odd Terje Brustugun, to VG.
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• In Norway, about 3,000 people are diagnosed every year, and every four hours a patient dies of the disease. Eight out of ten cases are due to tobacco. Most people who get lung cancer today are diagnosed at a time when the disease can no longer be cured. It is this cancer that takes the most lives in Norway.
• Forecasts have traditionally been poor. Few people live for more than five years. This is now turning. Much has changed in lung cancer treatment since 2016, when immunotherapy against the disease was approved in Norway.
• It may now appear that immunotherapy may have an effect on a larger proportion of patients than previously thought.
• Here are the most promising results:
Decision forum says yes to lung cancer medicine
1. Patients with proliferation live longer with immunotherapy
Patients who receive immunotherapy as the first treatment option after proven spread live longer. Five-year data on a patient group with non-small cell lung cancer shows that up to 23 percent are alive after five years.
Data from the Cancer Registry show that 2.7 per cent of patients with lung cancer, advanced disease, were alive after five years, writes Dagens Medisin.
Survival for the entire patient group is 24.5 percent for women and 17.9 percent for men, according to the Cancer Registry.
- Then it goes without saying that there is a very big advance that over 20 percent of this patient group lives longer than 5 years, says Grønberg.
Immunotherapy as first line treatment for all patients with the most common form of lung cancer was introduced in Norway in April this year.
- For a subgroup we see that one in three patients lives for five years - that is ten times better than we have seen before. I hope we get the opportunity to give such treatment to more people in the near future, ”says Brustugun.
New study on lung cancer: Can go from fatal to chronic disease
2. Immunotherapy may have an effect early in the course of treatment
Six studies presented at ASCO show promising effect of immunotherapy given before surgery.
Today, surgery is the most important curative treatment for patients with non-small cell lung cancer (see fact box). But not everyone who is undergoing surgery becomes healthy and several attempts have been made to improve their survival by providing chemotherapy and radiotherapy before surgery, without much luck.
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