New Drug Therapy Boosts Survival Rate of Blood Cancer Patients
From Times staff and wire reports
French doctors report in today’s New England Journal of Medicine that adding the drug cytarabine to a mix of two others can improve the survival rate for patients suffering from chronic myelogenous leukemia, a blood cancer that typically afflicts mature adults. Chronic myelogenous leukemia, or CML, strikes about one out of every 50,000 Americans annually.
The French team found that the 360 patients who received cytarabine along with the conventional medicines hydroxyurea and interferon-alfa had a death rate that was 36% lower than the rate for the 361 who received only the conventional drugs. But cytarabine produced so many side effects it was discontinued in 94 of the 360 patients who took it.
