Dr Akhil Kapoor talks to ecancer about his observational study to evaluate factors predicting survival in patients of non-small cell lung cancer with poor performance status in resource-constrained settings.

He begins by explaining the reason for the study was that a lot of NSCLC patients presented with poor performance status, and all major landmark studies have excluded patients with poor performance status, meaning there is limited information available on how to treat these patients.

He then goes on to mention that out of 245 patients, 192 received oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors and supportive care, 45 received supportive care alone, while 8 patients received chemotherapy along with supportive care. Median overall survival was 3 months in patients who received oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors versus 1 month in patients who received supportive care alone.

Dr Kapoor concludes that the use of oral tyrosine kinase inhibitors on a compassionate basis led to improvement in survival in the overall cohort of the patients and that this was principally driven by EGFR-mutated patients.

Read the full article here.