NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Injecting chemotherapy directly into the abdomens of women with ovarian cancer can help them live longer and experience fewer unpleasant side effects of treatment, researchers report in Thursday's issue of The New England Journal of Medicine.
According to the investigators, this type of treatment subjects the tumor to a "bath of drugs" more concentrated than traditional chemotherapy administered through intravenous injection.
Patients treated with abdominal chemotherapy regimens lived an average of eight months longer than patients who received standard chemotherapy, reported Dr. David S. Alberts of the University of Arizona.
All of the 654 women in the study had stage III disease, meaning that the tumor had spread beyond their ovaries. After the tumors were removed, the women were randomized to one of the two treatment groups.
The drug used in the study was cisplatin, the most commonly used drug for the treatment of ovarian cancer. Cisplatin often causes side effects such as ringing in the ears, hearing loss, blood-count abnormalities, and neuromuscular damage. Giving the drug abdominally, significantly decreased the number of those side effects, Alberts reported.
Overall, the abdominal treatment increased survival by 20% and reduced the risk of death in the years after treatment by 24%. In addition, hearing loss was reduced by 67% in the group that received the abdominal treatment, the researchers reported.
Some women in the abdominal treatment group experienced stomach pain following the injections, but the researchers described these incidents as mild compared to some previous studies of abdominal chemotherapy in which patients experienced chronic stomach pain and inflammation from the treatment.
According to the American Cancer Society, 14,800 women will die from ovarian cancer this year, and 26,700 new cases will be diagnosed in the United States.
SOURCE: The New England Journal of Medicine (1996;335:1950-1955)
