Background: Anaplastic thyroid carcinoma (ATC) has a very dire prognosis and no effective therapeutic strategies have been established for ATC patients, especially those with stage IVB or IVC. Our objective was to investigate the effectiveness of weekly paclitaxel administered as induction chemotherapy and to establish novel therapeutic strategies for ATC.
Methods: We performed induction chemotherapy by weekly paclitaxel administration for patients with stage IVB (nine patients) and IVC (four patients) disease. Clinical and histological responses were assessed. Overall survival was compared with that of ATC patients with stage IVB (n = 50) and IVC (n = 13) treated without paclitaxel.
Results: One patient demonstrated complete response (CR) and two demonstrated partial response (PR) in the stage IVB group (response rate: 33%), and one patient showed PR in stage IVC (response rate: 25%). Curative surgery and adjuvant therapy were performed for four patients with stage IVB, and 32 months after treatment, all the four are alive and free of disease. One CR patient and one stable disease patient were assessed as grade IV (complete remission) and grade III (nearly CR) on histological response, respectively. All four patients with stage IVC died of carcinoma within 8 months. Overall survival of stage IVB patients with induction chemotherapy was better (p = 0.0213) than that without the chemotherapy and also better (p = 0.0467) than those with chemotherapy other than paclitaxel. However, induction chemotherapy did not improve the overall survival of stage IVC patients (p = 0.2002).
Conclusions: Induction chemotherapy by weekly paclitaxel is a promising therapeutic strategy for stage IVB ATC patients. Responders can be expected to achieve long-term survival. We could not get significant difference of overall survival between stage IVC patients with or without weekly induction paclitaxel, although there were some cases that responded well.