March 18, 2008 – Treating mesothelioma has always been difficult. The asbestos-related cancer is notoriously treatment-resistant, and it’s an aggressive disease that can spread quickly. To make matters worse, it’s difficult to diagnose early enough for patients to be treated in Stage I or II of the disease, when treatments are most effective.

Another problem with current mesothelioma treatment—and surgery in particular—is that there’s simply not much information available to doctors about the relative efficacy of certain treatments. For those rare patients who are diagnosed early, receiving the treatment that will do them the most good isn’t always a given, due to this lack of information.

Previous analyses of the efficacy of different surgical procedures for the treatment of pleural mesothelioma have been controversial. The main reason for this is that sample sizes used in the studies have been too small for doctors to derive accurate results. To get meaningful results, studies must include more than a handful of patients.

That’s why researchers from several different institutions have collaborated on a study that was carried out to try and determine what type of surgery is most effective for the treatment of pleural mesothelioma.

The researchers involved in the project hail from three highly-respected faculties: the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, the New York University Medical Center, and the University of Hawaii. The study was carried out at these three different locations so that researchers could include a greater number of patients.

The research undertaken is one of the largest—if not the largest—studies carried out to determine the efficacy of surgical procedures for pleural mesothelioma, with a total of 663 patients included in the study.

The surgical procedures and results of the patients at the three different institutions were recorded over a period of several years between 1990 and 2006. The average age of the patients was 63, and the study included 538 men and 125 women.

Each of the patients involved in the study had undergone either extrapleural pneumonectomy, or a pleurectomy and decortication procedure. A pneumonectomy is complete removal of one lung, along with the complete pleural sac that lines the organ. The pleurectomy and decortication procedure involves removal of part of a lung, as well nearby diseased pleural tissue.

Results of the study showed that there were significant differences in survival rate of patients depending not only on the surgery they received, but a number of other factors as well.

Patients who received a pleurectomy and decortication procedure had an improved survival rate compared to patients who underwent an extrapleural pneumonectomy. The researchers warn, however, that the reasons for this are “multifactorial”, meaning that they cannot pinpoint any single cause for the differences.

The conclusion of the researchers was that the type of surgery a patient receives for mesothelioma should depend on the stage of their disease, as well as the overall health of the patient, and the type of treatment regime that they will undergo. This may not be new information for doctors, but it does confirm that some surgical treatments are more effective than others—even if researchers do not understand the exact reason for the difference.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 5:08 pm and is filed under Mesothelioma Treatment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS feed. Responses are currently closed, but you trackback from your own site.