CONTEXT: Real-world study from Japan showing increased rates of pneumonitis with first-line pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy in patients with advanced NSCLC.
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1. “During a median follow-up of 5.5 months, 12.4% of patients developed pneumonitis of any grade and 3.3% of patients had grade 3 or higher pneumonitis, making it the most common severe nonhematologic treatment-related adverse event (AE) among the study participants.”
2. “medwireNews: A Japanese real-world study has found higher rates of pneumonitis with first-line pembrolizumab plus chemotherapy among patients with advanced nonsquamous non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC) than previously reported in clinical trials.”
3. “Most cases of pneumonitis occurred within the first 90 days of patients initiating treatment, and so the researchers propose that “patients should undergo careful surveillance during the initial 90-day period following the commencement of the combination therapy.””
4. “By contrast, in the KEYNOTE-189 trial of the combination in this patient population, “the frequency of all-grade and severe pneumonitis was 4.4% and 2.7%, which are lower than those in our study, and these reported rates are despite the longer follow-up period than that of our study,” say the researchers in the European Journal of Cancer.”
5. “The median time to pneumonitis onset was 2.6 months and the majority (73.0%) of patients with pneumonitis discontinued treatment.”