The standard of care for at least stage I and II NSCLC is surgery, sometimes followed by chemotherapy. We know, however, that not every patient who presents with early stage NSCLC is healthy enough to pursue surgery, whether due to general age-related or other illnesses, or due specifically to a low pulmonary reserves, usually from years of smoking.

We've always been tempted to see if we can add more to standard approaches to improve our outcomes. In SCLC, people have attempted to add taxol to cisplatin and etoposide as part of the PET regimen (platinum + etoposide + taxol). Although heavily tested, it clarified that triplet therapy with standard chemo for SCLC appears to be associated with no improvement in outcomes but with a very significant improvement in side effects, including risk of dying from treatment.

While there are good reasons to not pursue chemo after surgery for stage I NSCLC, there are several factors that argue at least for strong consideration of adjuvant chemotherapy for higher risk patients. Because stage IB generally has a less favorable prognosis than stage IA, it's not suprising that the debate about which patients should or should not be receiving post-op chemo has centered more on the stage IB population, which have much more commonly been included in trials testing the value of adjuvant chemotherapy.

Over the last several years, chemo for resected early stage NSCLC has become a standard of care, but while it's pretty widely accepted for stage II and IIIA patients after surgery, the role for chemo is much more debatable for stage I patients. I'll try to explain why, starting with the downside, and then turn to some of the reasons to consider it.

Despite the fact that a very significant proportion of the "real world" patients have considerable medical problems such as markedly decreased lung function (pretty common with many years of smoking), weight loss (5 or 10% of body weight is usually considered a problem), or otherwise are not able to be very active.

The fact is that lung cancer, like many others, is a disease disproportionately affecting older populations, with the median age now in the 69-70 range.

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I've recently received some questions about the advantages and disadvantages of maintenance Avastin as a single agent for patients after completion of 6 cycles of first line chemo and avastin together for avastin-eligible patients. While this is generally considered to be a standard of care, many oncologists question whether it should be done. It's worth looking at how that standard came about and the strength of the evidence for it.

Although consolidation taxotere after concurrent chemo and radiation therapy (CT/RT) emerged as the preferred treatment approach for about 2/3 of American oncologists over the last few years, this was predicated on an incomplete story. We received information from an additional two studies this year, and now it’s a big mess.

As I described in my last post, there is a strong consensus that overlapping chemotherapy (CT) and radiation therapy (RT) provides greater efficacy, meaning higher survival rates, than a sequential, non-overlapping approach for stage III, unresectable NSCLC. Beyond that, it’s a bit of a mess, with a wide range of choices and no clear “right” choice.

In my last post I covered much of the controversy about whether patients with stage IIIA, N2-node positive NSCLC should be treated with induction therapy (chemotherapy or chemo/radiation) followed by surgery, or an alternative approach of chemo along with radiation delivered at a definitive dose (curative, not just the supplemental, lower doses used in induction therapy).