Chemotherapeutic agents, doses, duration, courses, interval time, and other factors greatly vary among studies, which is likely to cause statistical bias among them.
The variables included six continuous variables (age, duration of chemotherapy courses, interval between surgery and chemotherapy, cumulated dosage of oxaliplatin and mRNA expression levels of ERCC1 and TS) and eight categorical variables (sex, primary tumor location, tumor stage, tumor differentiation, lymph node staging, nerve invasion, vascular invasion and chemotherapy regimens).
In addition to those reporting cut-off values according to time course interval listed in Table 4, the following four studies investigated the clinical usefulness in predicting neurological outcome after CPR not in accordance with time course interval.
The CE arm in the current trial had a slightly prolonged course interval and a slightly greater incidence of dose reduction when compared to the SPE regimen.
Bitches from the test group were evaluated with respect to physical (age), pathological (Histological type, time course – interval between tumor diagnosis and surgical removal, number of nodules, clinical staging, ulceration and vascularization) and clinical (metastasis, censure) characteristics.
Figure 1 shows that, among patients who had at least 2 courses (n = 139), 23% had an average between-course interval of 6 to 7 months (24 to 27 full weeks), 21% had an average interval of less than 6 months, and 56% had an average interval of more than 7 months.
The CE arm in the current trial had more pronounced thrombocytopenia, which was considered manageable because none of the patients in the CE arm showed grade 3 or 4 bleeding, and the CE arm had a slightly prolonged course interval and a slightly greater incidence of dose reduction.
For those with repeated cefepime courses, an interval of less than 15 days was considered as a single administration, while an interval of more than 15 days was considered as multiple administrations.
After biopsy, all patients received neoadjuvant anthracycline-based chemotherapy with doxorubicin (30 50 mg/m2 at day 1), pirarubicin (20 mg/m2 at days 1 to 3) or epirubicin (35 100 mg/m2 at day 1), for six courses, the interval between each course being 3 weeks.
An advantage of the weekly regimen is shortening of the treatment period from 18 24 weeks with standard treatment (six courses with intervals of 3 4 weeks) to 6 8 weeks with weekly treatment using similar total cisplatin dose.
This necessitated changing the compass course at intervals more to the west on account of increased wind velocity with height according to our weather report.
