Long Term Survivors with Metastatic Pancreatic Cancer Treated with Gemcitabine Alone or Plus Cisplatin: a Retrospective Analysis of an Anatolian Society of Medical Oncology Multicenter Study

Background: The majority of patients with pancreatic cancer present with advanced disease. Systemicchemotherapy has limited impact on overall survival (OS) so that eligible patients should be selected carefully. Theaim of this study was to analyze prognostic factors for survival in Turkish advanced pancreatic cancer patients whosurvived more than one year from the diagnosis of recurrent and/or metastatic disease and receiving gemcitabine(Gem) alone or gemcitabine plus cisplatin (GemCis).
Methods: This retrospective evaluation was performed forpatients who survived more than one year from the diagnosis of recurrent and/or metastatic disease and whoreceived gemcitabine between December 2005 and August 2011. Twenty-seven potential prognostic variableswere chosen for univariate and multivariate analyses to identify prognostic factors associated with survival.
Results: Among the 27 variables in univariate analysis, three were identified to have prognostic significance:sex (p = 0.04), peritoneal dissemination (p =0.02) and serum creatinine level (p=0.05). Multivariate analysis byCox proportional hazard model showed only peritoneal dissemination to be an independent prognostic factorfor survival.
Conclusion: In conclusion, peritoneal metastasis was identified as an important prognostic factorin metastatic pancreatic cancer patients who survived more than one year from the diagnosis of recurrent and/or metastatic disease and receiving Gem or GemCis. The findings should facilitate pretreatment prediction ofsurvival and can be used for selecting patients for treatment.