Abstract
Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is the most frequent primary tumor of this anatomical structure. It is usually caused by exposure to asbestos and the incidence continues to rise despite the fact that work with asbes-tos is banned in European countries.
Presented is a set of data on consecutive patients treated with standard first-line cisplatin/pemetrexed chemotherapy in Czech centers. Another sample comprised patients receiving second-line pemetrexed therapy.
Data from 2008-2018 were analyzed at the Institute of Bfostatistics and Analyses in Brno. The study included 249 and 35 patients receiving first- and second-line therapy, respectively.
There were 66 females and 183 males with a mean age of 64 years. Occupational and non-occupational exposure to asbestos was confirmed in 58 and 23 cases, respectively; no exposure was found in 168 patients.
The most common his-tological types were epithelioid MPM in 167 patients, mixed in 26 and sarcomatokl in 16 patients; no histological type was determined in 40 subjects. There were 23 patients with TNM stage I. 41 Trtth stage II. 64 with stage III and 115 with stage IV.
For the entire sample, the median progression-free survival was 9.6 months and median overall survival (OS) was 20.1 months. Patient survival was affected by the TNM stage and histological type of the tumor.
For the second-line therapy, the median OS was 9.9 months. It may be concluded that the prognosis of patients with malignant mesothelioma is still not satisfactory and new treatment options need to be sought.
Com-ments on outcomes of some recent studies are added.