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Chemotherapy: First-Line Strategy

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Ovarian Cancer in Elderly Patients

Abstract

While standard first-line chemotherapy with 3-weekly carboplatin AUC 5mg/mL/min and paclitaxel 175 mg/m² in advanced ovarian cancer may be feasible in selected elderly patients such as those included in prospective trials, in a wider selection of patients ≥70, as this is the case in everyday practice, the standard carboplatin-paclitaxel regimen has shown an excess of toxicity and led to premature treatment stopping. For elderly patients thought to be vulnerable and at high risk of toxicity with the standard 3-weekly carboplatin-paclitaxel regimen, other options are commonly used: carboplatin as a single agent and carboplatin-paclitaxel regimen in a weekly schedule for both drugs. To date, there is no randomized trial to give practitioners some evidence on how to select patients who could benefit from one or the other regimen described above. The GINECO has therefore designed EWOC-1 (Elderly Women Ovarian Cancer), an international multicenter randomized phase II trial, to compare three different regimens: paclitaxel + carboplatin every 3 weeks, single-agent carboplatin every 3 weeks and weekly paclitaxel and carboplatin in a selected population of vulnerable elderly patients (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT02001272).

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Correspondence to Olivia Le Saux .

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Le Saux, O., Falandry, C., Freyer, G. (2016). Chemotherapy: First-Line Strategy. In: Freyer, G. (eds) Ovarian Cancer in Elderly Patients. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23588-2_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23588-2_5

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