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Drug Offers No Benefit to Liver Cancer Patients
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TUESDAY, Jan. 9 (HealthDay News) -- A new liver cancer drug is no more effective than a placebo, according to German researchers. Liver cancer is relatively common throughout the world, and there are very few treatment options for it. For some patients, a liver transplant or resection can help, but most are diagnosed too late to benefit from either of these treatments. Scientists have been working to develop minimally invasive treatments for liver cancer. One such treatment, a drug called short-acting octreotide, was shown to improve survival, but the twice-daily administration of the drug was associated with too many side effects. For the new study, published in the January issue of Hepatology, researchers from University Hospital Freiburg in Germany examined the effects of a new drug, long-acting octretide. The study included 119 people with liver cancer from seven hospitals in Germany and Switzerland. About half of the participants were assigned to receive monthly injections of 30 milligrams of the drug, and the other half received a placebo. Neither the patients nor those administering the injections knew who was getting the drug and who was getting the placebo. The participants had routine follow-up examinations one, three and six months after starting the medication, and every six months thereafter for at least a year. By the end of the study, 54 participants in the octreotide group and 52 in the placebo group had died after a median of 4.7 months and 5.3 months, respectively. No participant experienced an improvement in their liver tumor. The rate of side effects was similar between the two groups, with the most common side effect in the octreotide group being diarrhea. "This is the first randomized, controlled trial that analyzed the effect of long-acting octreotide on [liver cancer] growth and patient survival," the authors wrote. "We observed no survival improvement in [liver cancer] patients treated with octreotide in contrast to placebo treated patients." More information The American Cancer Society has more about liver cancer.
Last Updated: Jan. 09, 2007 Copyright © 2007 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved. |