Association between hospital volume, treatment patterns and overall survival (OS

Hi everyone,

Gavin just posted a bunch of interesting research abstracts on cholangiocarcinoma to be presented at next week’s big ASCO (American Society of Clinical Oncology) meetings.  I encourage that you take a look.

The abstract below is a particularly important one.  The researchers demonstrate that intrahepatic CCA patients who were treated in major medical centers which see a high volume of iCCA patients were more likely to be sent for surgery, and they had a higher overall survival.

The study looked at a large number of patients over more than a thousand medical centers.  Half of the medical centers examined saw two or fewer iCCA patients in a year.  By contrast, the (unidentified) center with the highest volume saw 92 patients.

The medical centers were divided into three groups based on how many iCCA patients they saw. Median overall survival of iCCA patients at the highest volume centers was 13 months compared to 5 months at the group of medical facilities seeing the fewest numbers of iCCA patients.  This is in part due to the more aggressive treatment offered patients at high volume centers.  34.1 percent of iCCA patients at high volume centers were sent to surgery, as compared to 13.1 percent at low volume centers.  Adjuvant (post surgery) chemotherapy and radiation were more frequently provided at the high volume centers.

These data substantiate the recommendation often repeated on this board – that patients should look for doctors and facilities with a lot of experience with this rare cancer.  If you look at the abstract, you can see some research numbers that illustrate the importance of this advice.

Regards, Mary