Metronomic Chemotherapy: Seems Prowess to Battle against Cancer in Current Scenario.

Abstract

Metronomic chemotherapy is an emerging method of chemotherapy. Metronomic 'lowdose' chemotherapy regimen induces tumour dormancy and reduces cancer resistance against anticancer drugs. It tends to improve overall success rate of cancer chemotherapy than conventional cyclical regimen. The aim of this systemic review was to provide comprehensive data of metronomic chemotherapy trials, regimens used and it's outcome in cancer therapeutics. Fifty chemotherapy trial data were searched sequentially from web. The main sources were official website of Clinical trial forum, USA and Clinical Trial Registry India (CTRI). Evidence on efficacy and safety of such metronomic chemotherapy trials was gathered from various data published in Medline, New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), Lancet Oncology and other journals with high credentials. As a result of our search, out of 50 trials including breast -15(30%), colon-, 5(10%) ovarian -5(10%), prostate-5(10%) and others including haematologic, soft tissue and nervous system malignancies -20 (50%). Twenty seven trials showed favourable, 20 trials showed equivocal outcome and 3 trials reported unfavourable outcome. Overall comparison showed definitive statistical significance for using metronomic regimen (p-0.05). It can be concluded that metronomic chemotherapy regimen seems convincing beneficial to induce tumour remission and survival at a higher than conventional regimen. More metanalyses are needed to frame common metronomic chemotherapeutic regimen.