Ninety-year-olds also need to be treated for cancer
Including surgical methods
The world is rapidly aging, the proportion of elderly people is increasing, but stereotypes associated with old age are changing slowly. In particular, it turns out that not treating cancer patients older than ninety years is a common thing. Why, they say, torment a person – it's still "the age of survival". However, the latest study shows that providing treatment to people over the age of ninety with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) correlates with a greater five-year survival rate. Isn't every year of life precious?
Researchers from the Stanford University Medical Center of California (Stanford University Medical Center), having studied the medical histories of 7205 patients over 90 years old with NSCLC contained in the National Cancer Database, found that 57.6% of them did not receive any therapy at all. Receiving treatment was associated with significantly better survival (a five-year survival rate of 9.3% among those who received treatment versus 1.7% among those who were not treated). The most pronounced survival rate of those treated was observed among 1,430 patients with the first stage of the disease.
Article by Yang et al. The Oldest Old: A National Analysis of Outcomes for Patients 90 Years or Older With Lung Cancer is published in the journal The Annals of Thoracic Surgery.
Doctors are very reluctant to operate on extremely elderly patients, however, the study showed that surgery in patients with the first stage of NSCLC correlated with a much better five-year survival compared with both therapy without surgery and with no therapy.
"These oldest patients should not be deprived of treatment just because of their age," the authors write, "Rather, how to treat such patients should be discussed in a multidisciplinary setting. In fact, for correctly identified patients over 90 years of age with the earliest stage of NSCLC, surgical intervention may not only be a reasonable, but also potentially optimal treatment strategy."
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