Editorial
Patient accrual into chemotherapy trials in non-small cell lung cancer
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In this edition of Thorax Spiro and colleagues1 report their perceived failure to recruit patients to the Big Lung trial (BLT). It is appropriate to consider why only 9% of eligible patients entered the trial and what impact this has on this important study.
BLT addresses the role of cisplatin-based combination chemotherapy in
non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC). This is not a trivial regime in a
patient group with a median age of 67 years, many of whom will have
major vascular co-morbidities. That fewer than one sixth of patients
were deemed ineligible for these reasons is surprising. It is also
noteworthy that 12% of patients had elective chemotherapy
presumably
all with inoperable disease since there is no current evidence to
justify routine postoperative adjuvant therapy. It is disappointing,
but hardly surprising in the current UK research environment with its
dependence on the pharmaceutical industry, that 13% of patients were
treated
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