Cisplatin, Mitomycin, and Interferon-α2a Combination Chemoimmunotherapy in the Treatment of Diffuse Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma

Time-dependent bias was common in survival analyses published in leading clinical journals

“…In three studies (7.9% [2.7-20.8%]), correction of time-dependent bias could have made the permissive hazard ratio or relative risk statistically significant [47,48,86]. In 20 studies where the relative risk was less than 1 (52.6% [37.3-67.5%]), correction of timedependent bias could have nullified previously significant hazard ratios or relative risks or could have transformed the preventive relative risk into a permissive hazard ratio or relative risk [45,50,52,53,55,57,[61][62][63]65,71,77,78,81,83,[87][88][89][90][91].…”

A retrospective analysis of malignant pleural mesothelioma patients treated either with chemotherapy or best supportive care between 1990 and 2005

“…However, only 5% of the patients with DMPM are usually eligible for such a curative surgery at the time of diagnosis [7]. For this reason, most of the DMPM patients are often treated with chemotherapy (CT) or best supportive care (BSC) [8][9][10][11][12][13][14]. The overall response rate is around 30% and this is not very satisfactory with CT regimens.…”

“…Median survival time has not been long enough to justify chemotherapy schedules until recently. Nonetheless, some studies have suggested that mesothelioma may not be totally chemotherapy-resistant and that some chemotherapeutics are moderately effective or tolerable, especially for responders [8][9][10][11][13][14][15]. In addition, combinations of novel chemotherapeutic agents, such as gemcitabine-cisplatin, oxaliplatin-raltitrexed, cisplatinraltitrexed appeared to give promising results with response rates of more than 30% [16][17][18].…”

The Role of Immunotherapy in the Treatment of Mesothelioma

“…There was a nonsignificant difference in the median survival of patients that were treated with this combination (15 months) compared to the control (8 months) (Tansan et al, 1994). In a similar study utilising the same combination but with IFN-2a in 43 patients, there was no significant survival benefit in the treated group (11.7 months) vs. the untreated group (7 months) (Metintas et al, 1999). Twenty-six patients treated with cisplatin and IFN-2a showed a similar median survival time of 12 months vs. 8 months (Soulié et al, 1996).…”