• Sarya Swed, Nour Shaheen, Wael Hafez, Nesreen Elsayed Talat, Samah S Rozan, Rehab Diab, Abdulqadir J Nashwan, Karam R Motawea, Hidar Alibrahim, Mhd Kutaiba Albuni, Elias Battikh, Bisher Sawaf, and Sheikh Shoib.
• Faculty of Medicine, Aleppo University, Aleppo, Syria.
• Medicine (Baltimore). 2022 Dec 2; 101 (48): e31940e31940.

BackgroundThis paper aims to compare the effectiveness and safety of pembrolizumab and paclitaxel as a second line for patients with locally advanced gastroesophageal cancer.MethodsBy searching PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Ovid, any randomized clinical study comparing the effectiveness of paclitaxel and pembrolizumab as second-line therapy for advanced gastroesophageal cancer met the inclusion criteria. Only 3 of the 23 eligible studies that were fully reviewed were eligible for meta-analysis.ResultsThe total number of patients included in the meta-analysis was 635 in the pembrolizumab group and 596 in the paclitaxel group. In terms of objective response rate, there was no statistically significant difference between pembrolizumab and paclitaxel (relative risk = 1.10, 95% CI = 0.80-1.50, P = .57). Furthermore, Pembrolizumab and paclitaxel did not differ in terms of the rate of partial response statistically significantly from one another, according to the overall analysis (relative risk = 0.93, 95% CI = 0.57-1.52, P-value = .78).ConclusionThere is no difference between pembrolizumab and paclitaxel in objective response rate. The objective response rate shows that doctors may consider either treatment for patients with advanced gastroesophageal cancer, given the time to response is comparable across therapies.Copyright © 2022 the Author(s). Published by Wolters Kluwer Health, Inc.

5 keywords...

hide…