Background
Chemotherapy can offer an improvement in survival and cancer related symptoms. However, a proportion of patient do not receive benefit from treatment and may die from complications of chemotherapy. Several centres have demonstrated 30-day mortality rates ranging from 3.4% - 8.1%. We report our 30-day mortality for patients with Malignant Pleural Mesothelioma at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital
Methods
An audit was undertaken at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital (SCGH) between January 2012 and August 2016. Date of death was extracted from the International Association for the Study of Lung Cancer (IASLC) mesothelioma database with patients from SCGH and correlated with date of treatment given through our pharmacy dispensary database.
Results
We identified 186 patients in our IASLC database. 6 patients died (4.1%) within 30 days of receiving chemotherapy. 3 patients received 1st line treatment (2 patients had carboplatin/pemetrexed, 1 patient had cisplatin/pemetrexed), 3 patients received 2nd line treatment (2 patients had vinorelbine, 1 patient had gemcitabine). 1 death was related to treatment complications (febrile neutropenia and septicaemia), 4 were due to progression of disease, 1 unrelated to both treatment and progression of disease.
Conclusion
Our audit shows that a small number of patients die within 30 days of receiving treatment with a very low rate due to complications of treatment. Our results are similar with other published data. Further similar audits would be helpful to establish a standard benchmark.