• 10/31/2007
  • Orlando, FL
  • Kate McHugh, Ivanhoe Health Correspondent
  • www.ivanhoe.com

Head and neck cancers affect more than 40,000 people in the United States every year and more than 500,000 worldwide. When caught early, the prognosis is promising, but survival rates decrease as the disease advances. Now, two treatment therapies are making a big difference in the survival of patients suffering from advanced head and neck cancers.

Standard initial treatment for advanced head and neck cancers is chemotherapy. Two new studies show promising results with treatments following chemo.

“I think that patients get very scared when they get this diagnosis, frightened and anxious. I think they should recognize that we are now clearly above the 50-percent [survival] level — quite a bit above it,” Marshall Posner, M.D., medical director of the Head and Neck Oncology Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, told Ivanhoe.

In a recent study out of Europe, researchers found a combination therapy treatment, known as TPF — adding docetaxel to the standard PF therapy (cisplatin and fluorouracil) — improved survival outcomes by 27 percent in patients with an unresectable cancer — tumors that cannot be removed.

“What the European trial demonstrates is that TPF is a reasonable therapy for patients with an unresectable disease and promotes an improvement in survival,” said Dr. Posner, the lead author of another new study, which reveals using the TPF therapy after chemotherapy and following with chemoradiotherapy — a combination of chemotherapy with radiation therapy — gives patients a 30-percent reduction in mortality and may even eliminate the cancer.

“What our trial shows is that induction chemotherapy with TPF followed by chemoradiotherapy improves survival across all subtypes and groups of patients with head and neck cancer, and that it represents a reasonable treatment for patients with locally advanced disease,” Dr.Posner said.

According to Dr. Posner, these drugs are already FDA approved and available for treatment. “It would just be a matter of discussing it and deciding what is best for them in terms of the treatment,” Dr. Posner said.

“Both of these trials demonstrate one of the same things, which is that the three drug regimen … is significantly better in terms of survival for patients with advanced head and neck cancer compared to the prior standard care, which is PF,” Dr. Posner said.

Source:
Ivanhoe interview with Marshall Posner, M.D., The New England Journal of Medicine, 2007;357:1695-1704,1705-171