Annals of oncology : official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology
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Clinical Trial
High-dose treatment with lanreotide of patients with advanced neuroendocrine gastrointestinal tumors: clinical and biological effects.
Neuroendocrine tumors usually present with inoperable metastatic disease and severe hormonal symptoms. Specific chemotherapy, alpha-interferon and the somatostatin analog octreotide are established therapies in these patients but all of them eventually fail. Other somatostatin analogs, e.g., RC-160 and lanreotide, are currently being studied in different doses and modes of administration. ⋯ High-dose treatment with lanreotide (12,000 microg/d) produced tumor size response in 5%, stabilization in 70% and a biochemical response in 58% of patients. These results should be related to the advanced stage of the disease as indicated by the mean duration of disease of more than four years, but they do not appear to be better than those achieved with standard doses of somatostatin analogs. However, in responding patients we observed induction of apoptosis in the tumors, a phenomenon not seen with regular doses of somatostatin analogs, but often produced by chemotherapeutic agents.