A new study has suggested that people with inoperable anal cancer treated with carboplatin-paclitaxel had fewer complications and lived longer than those who received another chemotherapy that has been more often administered.
The results from an international trial, published by the Journal of Clinical Oncology, suggest that carboplatin-paclitaxel become the standard of care for anal cancer, a rare disease that accounts for less than 3 per cent of all gastrointestinal malignancies.
The InterAAct trial compared carboplatin-paclitaxel with cisplatin plus 5-flourouracil (5FU).
The overall survival of patients enrolled on the carboplatin-paclitaxel arm of the clinical trial was 20 months compared to 12.3 months for those on the cisplatin-5FU arm.
Carboplatin-paclitaxel was associated with significantly less adverse effects (36 per cent) compared to cisplatin-5FU (62 per cent).
Patients with inoperable anal cancer have a five-year survival rate of approximately 30 per cent.