Abstract: Objective To analyze the clinical outcomes between gefitinib integrated chemotherapy and chemotherapy alone among metastatic or recurrent nonsmall cell lung cancer (NSCLC) patients who failed in previous treatment with gefitinib and chemotherapy. Methods A total of 33 pairs patients with metastatic or recurrent NSCLC who had progressed on prior therapies and received gefitinib plus chemotherapy or chemotherapy alone between January 2006 and June 2011, were matched according to gender (male vs female), age(<65 vs≥65years old), Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group (ECOG) performance status (PS) (0-1 vs 2), progress free survival (PFS) of gefitinib treatment(4-6 vs >6months),number of previous chemotherapy regime and status of tumor at diagnosis, by using a matched-pair case-control study design. Results With 14.5 months of median follow-up, the overall response rates and disease control rates in the integrated-treated and chemotherapy alone groups were 9.1% versus 6.5% and 39.4% versus 30.3%, respectively. There was no statistically significant difference noted with regard to overall survival (OS) (from first gefitinib therapy to death, median, 10.4 vs 7.9 months) and PFS (median, 4.2 vs 3.3 months) between the integrated-treated and chemotherapy alone groups. Conclusions This retrospective analysis shows that there is no difference in clinical outcomes between integrated treatment and chemotherapy alone in patients with metastatic or recurrent NSCLC who failed in previous treatment with gefitinib and chemotherapy.

Key words: gefitinib, chemotherapy, non-small cell lung cancer, overall survival