ReviewDrugs & aging2017
Cancer Immunotherapies: Are They as Effective in the Elderly?
Review in Drugs & aging, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 42 citations in OpenAlex.
- A multicenter, open-label, phase II trial of pemetrexed plus bevacizumab in elderly patients with previously untreated advanced or recurrent nonsquamous non-small cell lung cancer.Thoracic cancer · 2023Trial
- Tumor immunology: unraveling the complex interaction between tumors and the immune system: a narrative review.Annals of medicine and surgery (2012) · 2025Review
- [Age-associated changes of the immune system: immunosenescence and effects on vaccinations].Zeitschrift fur Gerontologie und Geriatrie · 2025Review
- Efficacy and safety of first-line nivolumab plus ipilimumab treatment in elderly patients (aged ≥ 75 years) with non-small cell lung cancer.Journal of cancer research and clinical oncology · 2025Article
- Efficacy and Safety of First-line Pembrolizumab Plus Platinum and Pemetrexed in Elderly Patients with Non-squamous Non-small-cell Lung Cancer.Internal medicine (Tokyo, Japan) · 2025Article
- Article
- Article
- Efficacy and safety of immune checkpoint inhibitors in elderly patients with primary liver cancer: a retrospective, multicenter, real-world cohort study.Cancer immunology, immunotherapy : CII · 2023Article
- Biomarkers predicting the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors in hepatocellular carcinoma.Frontiers in immunology · 2023Review
- Construction of Molecular Subtype and Prognosis Prediction Model of Osteosarcoma Based on Aging-Related Genes.Journal of oncology · 2022Article
- Nutrition Interventions of Herbal Compounds on Cellular Senescence.Oxidative medicine and cellular longevity · 2022Review
- Early distinction of lymph node metastasis in patients with soft tissue sarcoma and individualized survival prediction using the online available nomograms: A population-based analysis.Frontiers in oncology · 2022Article
- Safety of Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors in Elderly Patients: An Observational Study.Current oncology (Toronto, Ont.) · 2021Observational
- Impact of Patient Age on Clinical Efficacy and Toxicity of Checkpoint Inhibitor Therapy.Frontiers in immunology · 2021Review
- Review
- Impact of age on the toxicity of immune checkpoint inhibition.Journal for immunotherapy of cancer · 2020Article
- Blockade of PD-1 and TIM-3 immune checkpoints fails to restore the function of exhausted CD8Immunologic research · 2020Observational
- Immunotherapy in Underrepresented Populations of Patients with Cancer: Do We Have Enough Evidence at Present? A Focus on Patients with Major Viral Infections and Autoimmune Disorders.The oncologist · 2020Article
- Efficacy and safety of immune checkpoint inhibitor monotherapy in pretreated elderly patients with non-small cell lung cancer.Cancer chemotherapy and pharmacology · 2020Article
- Efficacy and safety of first-line pembrolizumab monotherapy in elderly patients (aged ≥ 75 years) with non-small cell lung cancer.Journal of cancer research and clinical oncology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
5 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Almost two-thirds of all new cancer diagnoses are made in persons over the age of 65 years, yet it is unclear if age affects patient responsiveness to immunotherapy, which is increasingly becoming first-line therapy in advanced stages of different tumor types. Preclinical animal studies may be difficult to translate into humans since they frequently use young mice (2-3 months of age) equivalent to adolescent human subjects. Nevertheless, ex vivo studies from humans are concordant with mice tissue findings-older patients have an increased density of circulating regulatory immune cells and a decreased ratio of naïve-to-memory T cells. A review of different immunotherapy trials reveals that contrary to expectations, advanced age generally does not hinder safety and clinical response to different treatment modalities. A growing number of immune checkpoint inhibitor immunotherapy trials have been published with basic safety and clinical response data stratified by age. We present the clinical response data from 21 phase II/III clinical trials based on age stratification into young and old subgroups. Data from these trials indicate that these agents have an overall low toxicity profile and that they are similarly well-tolerated in young and old patient subgroups. However, drug-specific differences exist for immune checkpoint inhibition in elderly subjects when comparing overall survival and progression-free survival hazard ratios with those of young subjects. Additional work is needed to better stratify 'responders' and 'nonresponders' within the elderly age group in order to optimize immunotherapy use in a heterogeneous patient population.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.