Source: www.oncologynursingnews.com
Author: staff

A new review of data confirms that erythropoietin might be unsafe for people with head and neck cancers who receive the drug in combination with radiation: Radiation patients who were given erythropoietin had poorer outcomes than those who undergoing radiation treatment alone.

The hormone erythropoietin is used to combat the anemia suffered by many people undergoing cancer treatment. Because severe anemia can lower the oxygen supply to tumor cells, decreased oxygen in these cells is associated with more rapid tumor progression and a poorer response to therapy. “It has therefore been thought logical that using erythropoietin to correct anemia before or during chemotherapy, radiotherapy, or both would improve the prognosis,” observed radiation oncologist Phillippe Lambin and colleagues from the MAASTRO (Maastricht Radiation Oncology) Clinic in the Netherlands. Their review was published in The Cochrane Library (July 2009, issue 3), a publication of The Cochrane Collaboration, an international organization that evaluates medical research.

Dr Lambin’s team analyzed data from 5 published clinical trials involving nearly 1400 patients. The studies focused on whether combined radiation and erythropoietin was better than standard radiation therapy alone in the treatment of head and neck cancers. The reviewers learned that compared with patients who did not receive erythropoietin, those who did take it had significantly worse overall survival and significantly shorter times before their cancers worsened.

Data included in the review suggested that the reduced survival rates in the erythropoietin patients were not due to some toxic effect of the drug itself, such as an increase in deaths due to blood clots. The investigators instead hypothesize that the drug might actually cause some types of tumors to grow, and have concluded that patients with head and neck cancers should not receive erythropoietin as an addition to radiation therapy.

Source:
From the September 2009 Issue of ONN