As a follow-up to my last post and an end to this extended discusison of locally advanced NSCLC before moving to other topics, I'll just cover some more recent work on the topic of chemo followed by chemo and radiation for stage III NSCLC. In that post, I showed that over the past several years, we hadn't seen the promise of this induction strategy in small trials translate into especially favorable results in larger multicenter trials.

The last topic in our discussion of the evolving field of optimal treatment for locally advanced NSCLC is the potential role for induction chemotherapy before radiation, or, more commonly concurrent chemo/radiation (CT/RT).

My last post included studies that demonstrated no additional benefit from giving chemo after concurrent chemo/radiation for locally advanced NSCLC, but it's important to add a qualifier to that conclusion. The studies that have shown an overall favorable result from two cycles, or about 6-7 weeks, of chemo with radiation have thus far primarily been with cisplatin and not carboplatin.

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.

When I first started OncTalk, my first priority was to get some basic posts on the site that provided a quick and dirty assessment of the best standards we had for different stages of lung cancer. But not only did several of these gloss over a lot of material very quickly, that was really before I could add figures. I'm going to try to go over some issues that are on the site in a more thorough manner; how chemo and radiation concurrently became the preferred approach for stage III NSCLC is a good place to start.

At long last, and after years of planning, a new large phase III randomized clinical trial is getting underway to determine whether adding avastin to chemotherapy as post-operative (adjuvant) treatment for early stage NSCLC provides added benefit compared to chemotherapy alone.

In a previous post I described the open question about whether patients with locally advanced NSCLC should receive prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI) after completing chemo and chest irradiation.

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).

It's over, and I won (did you doubt me?).