A commonly prescribed medication used to counteract lung cancer therapy side effects could be minimizing a cancer treatment’s efficacy, according to research from Los Angeles-based Keck Medicine of USC.
To evaluate how baseline steroid use can affect immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, researchers analyzed clinical outcomes of 277 patients with non-small cell lung cancer. Corticosteroids, a frequently prescribed steroid to treat side effects common to this type of lung cancer, was associated with worse outcomes, the study found.
Among 88 patients at Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, N.Y., and 189 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles who received immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy, 21 were taking steroids at the start of ICI therapy. Compared to those not taking corticosteroids, these patients experienced a higher number of negative effects.
The study, published July 7 in Cancer Research Communications, found a worse overall response rate and shorter overall survival and progression-free survival rates among lung cancer patients taking the steroid concurrent with ICI therapy.
Additionally, higher doses of corticosteroids severely affected ICI therapy and patient outcomes more than small or medium doses.
“Although we recognize that these results must be interpreted with caution given that the number of patients on the medium dose of steroids [nine patients] and those who discontinued steroids [13] was small, these findings provide rationale for future studies to test whether clinical outcomes might be improved by reducing the dose or stopping steroids prior to the initiation of the ICI therapy,” the researchers concluded.
