Older Cancer Patients Skip Clinic Tests
Only 36 percent of U.S. cancer patients 65 and older take part in clinical trials despite making up 60 percent of the cancer population.
That’s the word in a new government study, to be published Monday in the Journal of Clinical Oncology.
If elderly patients do not participate in clinical trials, the treatments resulting from those trials may not be appropriate for them, said Dr. Lilia Talarico, of the Food and Drug Administration and lead author of the study. This is a significant concern, given that elderly patients represent the majority of cancer patients in the U.S.
Researchers performed a retrospective analysis of 28,766 people in 55 clinical trials of new cancer drugs or new indications of already approved drugs from 1995 to 2002.
Data on trials for the treatment of leukemia, lymphoma and cancers of the breast, lung, colon, ovary, pancreas and central nervous system were analyzed by age groups.