| [ Summary ] |
Response and toxicity evaluation guidelines commonly employed in clinical trials have recently been revised. These include the Response Evaluation Criteria in Solid Tumors (RECIST) and National Cancer Institute-Common Toxicity Criteria, version 2 (NCI-CTC, v2). These guidelines are not only more accurate and reproducible than the former versions, but more convenient to work with. There is a controversy over the methods used to evaluate primary gastrointestinal cancers in the Japanese criteria, which are the standard evaluation guidelines for trials conducted in Japan, and have not been validated. Some other measures have been introduced to evaluate the efficacy of anticancer agents. For example, the clinical benefit response has already been utilized in pancreatic cancer trials. Time to progression has also been recognized as an important measure to evaluate the efficacy of cytostatic agents, but a standardized definition has not been elucidated. |