Objectives
Despite availability of new treatments, the prognosis of lung cancer remains poor. This study aims to provide recent estimates of survival in patients with advanced non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in the US.
Methods
The survival of patients with advanced NSCLC was estimated using two US databases together covering 2010–2020. The study included patients with stage III or IV NSCLC diagnosed between 2010–2016 in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER) database, and patients with stage IIIB, IIIC or IV NSCLC, diagnosed between 2017–2020, without known oncogenic driver mutations who had completed ≥4 cycles of 1L treatment (restricted to platinum-based combinations, immuno-oncology monotherapy, or ipilimumab/nivolumab) in the Flatiron Health database, a US Oncology Electronic Medical Record database. Overall survival (OS) was defined as time from diagnosis of stage III or IV NSCLC to death or to date of last confirmed activity.
Results
A total of 49,298 and 133,395 patients with stage III and IV diagnosis respectively were identified in SEER. The 1-, 3- and 5-year OS for patients with Stage III disease were 55.1%, 26.3% and 17.5%, and for stage IV disease were 25.8%, 7.4% and 4.0%, respectively. The Flatiron database had 1,045 patients with stage IIIB, 130 patients with stage IIIC and 3,210 patients with stage IV disease at diagnosis. The 1- and 3-year OS for stage IIIB/IIIC disease were 72.5% and 36.4%, and for patients with stage IV disease were 65.9% and 24.6%, respectively.
Conclusions
Despite differences in study population characteristics between the two databases, the study shows that mortality in patients with advanced NSCLC remains high, underscoring the need for continued efforts to identify novel treatments and synergetic treatment combinations to improve patient outcomes.
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