Thalidomide therapy helps elderly myeloma patients live longer

Oct 7 2007

The drug thalidomide is making a comeback as a cancer fighting therapy and has been successfully used along with standard therapy to treat the blood cancer myeloma.

The standard chemotherapy treatment is decades old and uses the chemotherapeutic combination of the two drugs melphalan and prednisone.

Now researchers have found that the addition of thalidomide to the therapy gave elderly patients another 20 months life.

The researchers from Lille University say the drug also slowed the spread of myeloma and improved survival.

Multiple myeloma accounts for about 1-2 percent of all cancers and as a rule affects older people; it kills its victims within three years.

Dr. Thierry Facon, a specialist in blood diseases from Claude Huriez Hospital in Lille, and his colleagues examined 447 untreated patients aged 65 to 75; the group were randomly assigned to be given either the standard treatment or treatment with the addition of thalidomide.

Six years later the team found that those who received thalidomide lived on average nearly 52 months, as against 33 months for those on the standard therapy.

Progression-free survival, the time it takes before the disease worsens, also improved by as much as 10 months.

Thalidomide is now also being tested in treating lung, blood and brain cancers and has also been approved to treat leprosy.

A brand of thalidomide is currently under review by European regulators for treating multiple myeloma, the drug is sold in the United States under the brand name Thalomid.

Dr. Facon says in recent years, some patients have also received bone marrow treatment that has boosted survival but bone marrow transplants are too harsh a therapy for frail, elderly patients.

Thalidomide is a drug which was used to fight nausea in pregnant women in the 1950s and 60s until doctors found it caused limb deformity in unborn children.

The researchers say the results of the trial provide strong evidence to suggest that the combination therapy using thalidomide should be the current reference treatment for previously untreated elderly patients with multiple myeloma.