A research letter spearheaded by an associate professor at the UT Health Houston School of Public Health argues that those who had cancer have similar survival rates as new cancer cases, and prior cancer should not be grounds to exclude a patient from clinical trials.
The research letter, written by Caitlin Murphy, PhD, and her colleagues and published June 15 in JAMA Oncology, found 19.4 percent of cancer cases diagnosed in 2019 were people who had prior cancer. Those prior cancers included 1.9 percent with the same type of cancer, 8.6 percent with a different cancer and 8.9 percent with an unknown cancer.
"The increase in number of persons newly diagnosed with cancer in the United States (from 1,618,263 in 2013 to 1,737,969 in 2019), combined with the increasing prevalence of prior cancer (from 18.4 percent in a previous study to 19.4 percent), show an approximately 15 percent increase in the number of cancer survivors diagnosed with a new cancer in six years," the letter said. "Recommendations against excluding patients from clinical trials solely on the basis of prior cancer are supported by growing evidence that persons newly diagnosed with cancer who have survived a prior cancer of a different type have equivalent survival compared with those without prior cancer."