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April 18th, 2012 
FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda TUESDAY, April 17 (HealthDay News) — Medicare patients who have
advanced non-small cell lung cancer appear to get no survival benefit from
adding the drug Avastin to standard chemotherapy, researchers from the
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute report.
An earlier trial had found that Avastin (bevacizumab) did improve
survival, but not in patients aged 65 and older. Even so, the researchers
noted, most patients diagnosed with non-small cell lung cancer are 65 and
older and Medicare still covers the cost of the drug.
“A drug that we were just ecstatic about in 2006, we have to be more
circumspect about,” said lead researcher Dr. Deborah Schrag, an oncologist
at Dana Farber, in Boston.
Avastin should be used judiciously, she added, noting that “older
patients should discuss it with their doctors, but we cannot say it
provides a survival advantage based on these data.”
However, Schrag does not think Medicare needs to reconsider funding
Avastin. “It may be that it helps some patients,” she said. “But we should
not assume that Avastin needs to be part of the treatment package.”
Genentech, the maker of Avastin, said in a statement Tuesday that while
the study “is well-conducted, retrospective analyses that use
administrative information to determine clinical outcomes have
limitations.”
“Genentech agrees that certain people, such as those older than 65, are
typically underrepresented in randomized, controlled clinical trials used
for regulatory submissions. To address this, we collect and present data
on the ‘real world’ use of medicines through large phase 4 prospective
observational studies, which even when well-designed, also have
limitations, including non-randomization of study participants.”
The cost of the medication is also a factor in considering the use of
Avastin, experts have said.
In 2011, published reports pegged the cost of the drug at somewhere
between $4,000 and $9,000 a month, depending on co-pay assistance that’s
available from Genentech, Avastin’s manufacturer.
This latest report was published in the April 18 issue of the
Journal of the American Medical Association. The U.S. National
Cancer Institute funded the study.
For the study, Schrag’s team randomly assigned more than 4,000 Medicare
patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer to one of two
groups.
One group received Avastin plus chemotherapy, while the other group was
treated with chemotherapy alone. The researchers compared survival between
the groups.
They found average survival for patients receiving Avastin plus
chemotherapy was 9.7 months, compared with as much as 8.9 months for
patients on chemotherapy alone.
In terms of one-year survival, it was 39.6 percent for those getting
Avastin and chemotherapy and 40.1 percent for chemotherapy alone.
When they took into account demographic and clinical characteristics in
adjusted models, the researchers did not find a significant difference in
overall survival between patients treated with Avastin and chemotherapy
and those treated only with chemotherapy.
Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer of the American Lung
Association, said, “As I pointed out in the past, it is important to study
ways to extend quality of life in advanced lung cancer.”
This study shows that a drug that was useful in a general age group is
not effective in an older age group, he added. “Thus, it may save older
patients exposure to an ineffective drug with side effects,” he said.
“It is critical that, to the extent possible, we study treatments
separately in groups known to differ in responses, rather than subject all
to average responses,” he said.
More information
For more information on lung cancer, visit the U.S.
National Cancer Institute.
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