WEDNESDAY, July 6 (HealthDay News) — Women, older people and minorities are under-represented in lung cancer drug trials in the United States, according to a new study.
Researchers say that this could have a significant impact on the efficacy and safety of new treatments among these groups, particularly the elderly.
“Our results suggest that the trial population used for approval of drugs do not represent well the U.S. population who may receive the marketed agent,” the study’s principal investigator, Dr. Shakun Malik, a medical officer at the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in Silver Spring, Md., said in a news release.
“This fact is concerning particularly for older patients who may experience greater toxicity when given the same dose and combination of drugs based on testing in a younger population,” Malik explained in the release from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer.
In conducting the study, which was slated for presentation Wednesday at the 14th World Conference on Lung Cancer in Amsterdam, researchers reviewed 10 years of trial data for the treatment of non-small cell lung cancer submitted to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Continue reading “Patient Disparities Seen in Lung Cancer Drug Trials”
