Five years survival outcomes of head and neck cancer patients treated with palliative metronomic chemotherapy.

Abstract

e18009 Background: Palliative metronomic chemotherapy improved overall survival over intravenous chemotherapy in head and neck cancers. However, there is no data available about the 5-year outcomes with this regimen. Methods: This was a single-arm prospective study that enrolled head and neck squamous cell carcinoma patients warranting palliative chemotherapy. The chemotherapy administered was methotrexate 15 mg/m2 per oral weekly and celecoxib 200 mg per oral daily till the development of intolerable side effects or progression. Kaplan Meier method was used for estimation of OS and factors impacting the same were sought. A p-value of 0.05 was considered significant. Results: 200 patients were enrolled with a median age was 49.5 years (Range 22-85 years) and preponderance of male gender (175, 87.5%). The predominant site of malignancy was oral cavity in 144 patients (72.2%). Prior chemotherapy exposure was present in 78 patients (39%). The median FACT trial outcome index score was 43.7 (16.7-80.7). The median OS was 194 days (95%CI 181.7-206.3) . The 1-year, 3-years and 5-years OS were 17 %(Standard error-2.8%), 7.9% (Standard error-2.5%), and 3.9% (Standard error- 2%) respectively. The details of factors impacting OS are given in Table. Conclusions: Oral metronomic chemotherapy leads to a small proportion of patients having long term survival with metronomic chemotherapy. Clinical trial information: CTRI/2015/11/006392. [Table: see text]