الفهرس 
Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma OverviewOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Pleural mesothelioma represents 92% of all malignant mesotheliomas. There is no MPM curative treatment. Multimodality treatment is commonly used including chemotherapy, targeted therapy and radiotherapy. Because of MPM poor prognosis (OS 8-14 months), maintaining quality of life of patients became more important in MPM treatment.
In our study, we prospectively enrolled 55 consecutive patients with newly diagnosed MPM from multiple centers in Egypt. We assessed their quality of life before, during and after chemotherapy, using EORTC-QLQ.
The median age of included patients was 58 years (range, 36 to 86 years) with male to female ratio (1.3:1). 65.4% of cases were residents in endemic asbestos-areas. 73.9% had epithelial subtype
At time of diagnosis, 30 (54.5%) were early stages (stage I-II). Pleural effusion presented in 81.8%, with dyspnoea in 58.4% of cases and chest pain in 61.8%. Most patients (85.5%) didn’t have any surgical intervention. Blood samples were obtained showing median haemoglobin value of 12g/dL, median WBCs count of 8.4×109/L, median Platelets count of
290×109/L and LDH mean of 529.143 IU/L. 54% of cases received carboplatin and 40%
received cisplatin, both combined with pemetrexed in 78% and gemcitabine in 22% of cases.
Our study showed correlation between baseline QLQ scores and both weight loss and chest pain. Changes in QLQ scores during treatment didn’t correlate to any included characteristics. QLQ summary scores median was 68.9% at baseline, decreasing after 3 chemotherapy to 67% and rising again after 6 cycles to 73.3%.
The median Progression free survival (PFS) for all patients was 6.5 months, with significant correlation with disease stage (being longer in stages I-II) and also chemotherapy use of pemetrexed rather than gemcitabine