High-dose treatment with lanreotide of patients with advanced neuroendocrine gastrointestinal tumors: clinical and biological effects

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Somatostatin and Lanreotide in this clinical trial, phase ii publication.

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.

Who Took Part

The study group was 18 patients.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were adults, middle-aged adults and older adults, both men and women.

Nineteen patients with advanced neuroendocrine gastrointestinal tumors [13 carcinoids and six endocrine pancreatic tumors (EPT)], liver metastases being present in 18, most of them heavily pretreated, were included.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a pilot study.

It is described as a pilot, a small early test of whether a larger Somatostatin study would be practical.

What Was Measured

PubMed files the paper under topics including Antineoplastic Agents, Gastrointestinal Neoplasms, Neuroendocrine Tumors, Peptides, Cyclic, Pilot Projects and Somatostatin.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a pilot study of Somatostatin and Lanreotide in 18 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

Results are reported in around 7 sentences of the abstract; we leave them to the paper itself rather than summarise them.

The publication is from 1997 (Annals of oncology : official journal of the European Society for Medical Oncology), a journal based in England.

More context: the Somatostatin compound page and the Lanreotide compound page, all human trials.