Increased Chemotherapy Dose, Not Beneficial to Osteosarcoma Patients

Compared to standard doses of chemotherapy, a dose-intensive regimen of cisplatin and doxorubicin offered no clinical benefit in patients with the bone cancer osteosarcoma.

Such were the findings of a randomized clinical trial whose data has been reported in the January 17 issue of the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

In other cancers such as non-Hodgkin lymphoma and breast cancer, increasing the intensity of a chemotherapy regimen (means decreasing the number of days between chemotherapy treatments) may improve survival, as been shown in previous studies.

But that wasn’t the case in osteosarcoma: while the dose-intensive regimen killed tumor cells better than the standard regimen after surgery, survival rates were similar in both groups.

Read more details from the full report or read a copy of the article.