Women given chemotherapy for oesophagogastric cancer had better survival than men – but experienced worse side effects, a UK-based research project has found.
The British researchers at the Royal Marsden Hospital, London, UK, now want to undertake genetic studies to examine the different male and female reactions to treatment.
They are due to present their findings to the conference of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, meeting in Chicago, USA, at the weekend.
They studied the outcomes for 3,265 patients. 2,668 were men and 597 women.
They found that the proportion of women experiencing side-effects was twice the men. 10% of women suffered nausea and vomiting and 9% suffered diarrhoea.
The women also had, on average, five months longer survival than men.
Researcher Dr Avani Athauda said: "We tend to use a standard treatment approach for managing oesophageal and stomach cancers. What this research suggests is that there are significant differences between male and female patients not only in how they react to chemotherapy but also how long they survive following treatment for their cancer. For female patients, it may be worthwhile providing additional awareness and counselling for gastrointestinal side effects when prescribing chemotherapy.
"We already know that there are vast differences in the biology of these cancers between individual patients and we plan to further investigate at a genetic level why there might be such differences in how patients benefit from chemotherapy with varying survival."
Poster: Impact of age and sex on chemotherapy (CTx) efficacy, toxicity and survival in early oesophagogastric (OG) cancer: A pooled analysis of 3265 patients from four large randomised trials (OE02, OE05, MAGIC & ST03). American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Annual Meeting in Chicago 3 June 2019
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