Abstract
Nausea and vomiting are major adverse reactions in cancer chemotherapy and affect patients’quality of life.Though medical institutions have revised their antiemetic therapy guidelines,there have been few evaluations of the revisions especially for the continuous administration of anticancer drugs.We revised our guidelines for antiemetic therapy in the continuous administration of anticancer drugs and then investigated the effect on the incidence of nausea and vomiting and cost of antiemesis.
Our subjects were 39 patients receiving high dose FP therapy (Day 1 : cisplatin 80mg/m2 ; Day 1-5 : 5-fluorouracil 800 mg/m2)for esophageal cancer at Kobe City Medical Center General Hospital.A conventional antiemetic therapy group (conventional group) received granisetron 3mg on Day 1 (20 patients),and a revised antiemetic therapy group (revised group) received granisetron 3mg plus dexamethasone (DEX) 20mg on Day 1 and DEX 4-12mg on Day 2-5 (19 patients).The incidences of nausea and vomiting in the conventional group were 80.0% and 30.0%,respectively and in the revised group 52.6% and 15.8%,respectively.There were significant decreases in the incidences of nausea and vomiting in the revised group as compared with the conventional group on Day 2,3 and 5 and Day 3,respectively.The occurrence of vomiting was 0.80±1.88 times in the conventional group and 0.21±0.54 times in the revised group.
The cost of antiemesis for 1 course was 16,701±15,103 yen for the conventional group and 9,691±3,326 yen for the revised group.
These results suggested that our revised antiemetic therapy for the continuous administration of anticancer drugs could reduce the incidence of nausea and vomiting as well as the cost of antiemesis in cancer chemotherapy.
