Efficacy, safety, and cost of new anticancer drugs

doi:10.1136/bmj.325.7375.1302/a

BMJ 2002;325:1302 ( 30 November )

Letters

Efficacy, safety, and cost of new anticancer drugs

Pessimistic conclusion was not justified

Price needs to be evaluated against effectiveness

Authors' reply

Pessimistic conclusion was not justified

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR $---$ Garattini and Bertele' conclude that new anticancer drugs introduced during the past six years have not increased survivalor quality of life in cancer patients.¹ This is a surprisingconclusion to be made at the end of a decade during which unprecedentedadvances have been made in the treatment of common tumours, inboth survival and quality of life. Perhaps if they had examinedthe contemporary literature and taken account of oncology practicethey might have reached a less pessimisticconclusion.

The authors rely heavily for their negative general comments on the value of cancer chemotherapy and chemotherapy trials onthe population mortality based study of Bailar and Gornik, whichused data collected between 1970 and 1994, pre-dating by manyyears the period being consideredhere.

Most of the drugs examined have been evaluated extensively in randomised trials, many with evaluations of quality of life.For example, the taxanes significantly . . . [Full text of this article]

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Efficacy, safety, and cost of new anticancer drugs: Silvio Garattini and Vittorio Bertele'
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Correction: Andrea Messori, et al.
bmj.com, 29 Nov 2002 [Full text]
CANCER SURVIVAL-A PERSONAL PERSPECTIVE: JEFF D. UPTON
bmj.com, 6 Dec 2002 [Full text]