The newest prognosis for cancer may be longer chemotherapy.
Doctors and pharmaceutical companies are moving toward treating cancer patients with drugs continuously, even when they may not urgently need them. That would be a departure from the common practice of stopping treatment when the cancer is under control and resuming it only if the cancer worsens.
The strategy is called maintenance therapy — akin to periodic tune-ups aimed at preventing a car from breaking down. Doctors say it could prolong the time tumors are under control, helping to turn cancer into a chronic disease that is kept in check even if it is not cured.
While maintenance therapy is not entirely new, its use is growing, in part because some of the newer cancer drugs are more tolerable than the toxic ones of old and can be taken for longer periods.
At the recent annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, for instance, doctors filled a huge auditorium for a debate on whether it is time to adopt maintenance therapy for lung cancer, the nation's leading cause of cancer death. Other cancers for which maintenance therapy is being used or tried include ovarian cancer, multiple myeloma and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
But some experts say that in many cases, the longer-term use of drugs has not been proved to prolong life.
Instead, it may just subject cancer patients to more side effects and tens of thousands of dollars in extra costs. There is also concern that tumors might become resistant to a drug used for a long time.
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