The treatment of elderly and frail patients is always a fine line between doing too much so that you harm them and doing too little so that you don’t help them in an adequate way. When you see the data, it gets obvious that it’s a protective attitude probably from the physicians that they are afraid to harm patients, especially with chemotherapy. But we have data from the past where we can show that even frail and elderly patients tolerate chemotherapy...
The treatment of elderly and frail patients is always a fine line between doing too much so that you harm them and doing too little so that you don’t help them in an adequate way. When you see the data, it gets obvious that it’s a protective attitude probably from the physicians that they are afraid to harm patients, especially with chemotherapy. But we have data from the past where we can show that even frail and elderly patients tolerate chemotherapy. So, and when you see the Kaplan-Meier curves, it is definitely clear that chemotherapy is the most effective treatment step we have to take. And it’s important to get elderly patients to chemotherapy. You really can do something for them in terms of years, a better prognosis. Surgery is also important. We can see in elderly patients that when they have good surgery and good chemotherapy, they have an excellent prognosis. But for sure, there are patients where you can’t perform surgery the way you want to because they are afraid, they have comorbidities. But when you have to triage, whether you do surgery or chemotherapy, then you should always decide for chemotherapy. That’s the most effective formula.
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