Chemotherapy improves lung cancer survival, studies show

? Research now firmly establishes that chemotherapy can improve lung cancer survival, and experts say it should become routine treatment the way it already is for breast and colon cancers.

Several studies presented Saturday found that chemotherapy produced double-digit improvements in how many people beat the nation’s top killer from cancer.

“This should and will change the standard of care,” said Dr. Timothy Winton, of the National Cancer Institute of Canada, who led such an experiment.

The studies were presented at a meeting of 25,000 cancer experts.

About 200,000 people in the United States and Canada are diagnosed with lung cancer each year, and only about 15 percent survive five years. Drugs haven’t been as effective as for other cancers, and they’re currently used only for lung tumors that recur after surgery or have spread.

The first proof that chemotherapy could help more patients came last year when a landmark study found that the drug cisplatin boosted survival 5 percentage points for early-stage cancers that had not spread beyond the lung.

Now, two new studies in early-stage lung cancer patients found that drugs boosted survival 15 percent to 20 percent — similar to results in breast and colon cancers.

“Instead of being a 5 percent difference, where a lot of people would sit and discuss whether that was worth it, the difference was 20 percent,” said Bruce Johnson, director of the lung cancer program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

“Thousands of additional people are going to be cured of their disease if it’s applied widely,” he predicted.

That benefit could become even more important if screening X-rays called helical CT scans are able to detect more lung cancers earlier, as mammography does for breast cancer. The nation’s largest lung cancer screening study is currently enrolling 50,000 people to answer that question.

One of the two new lung cancer studies involved 344 patients in the United States and Canada, and was stopped early after researchers saw that 71 percent of patients getting Taxol and carboplatin after surgery survived vs. 51 percent who got surgery alone.

The drugs also cut the risk of dying of lung cancer in half, said researcher Gary Strauss of Rhode Island Hospital and Brown Medical School.

“I personally now would have trouble not offering chemotherapy to my patients,” he said.