Saturday, 11 May 2019

Avastin, to do or not to do? ( I beg for an urgent help)

Dear all,
One month after finishing radio/ chemo of my father, we had done an MRI that shows both bigger tumor and lots of edema.( We increase dexa to 8 mg and I stop boswellia and curcomin because of " foci of hemorrhage", which I deeply  regret doing that. Then around 16 days ago he found a ptosis in his left eye and pupiledema in the other eye. We add dexa to 16 for 3 days and acetozolamid (2*250). Left eye still has lots of problem and my father is sleeping most of the time. I start the supplements again.

Now in our meeting with our NO he said that we should take avastin 10 mg/ kg and temodal (second cycle) still 150 mg/ kg.
I was very interested in avastin before I have a more serious look of previous discussions here.
1) I really need to know whether it is not too much avastin to take with temodal? 5mg or 2.5 would not be more wiser?

2) if it be a pseudo-progrresion should we stop right after control of edema? and if the egfr is amplified would it harm to take few dose even  fore controlling edema?

I have to decide in two days about dosage  and I really appreciate any suggestion. (P.s. today I painfully found that there are few labs doing mutation tests here and I wasnot aware! I will do the mgmt, egfr amp. and cmv tomorrow. Could not convince the NO to write more test!)
Thanks in advance

1 comment:

  1. The main problem with the retrospective studies showing efficacy of lower dose Avastin, is that patients weren't randomized to standard dose or low-dose, so there may have been selection bias influencing the outcomes. Did patients with more aggressive tumors get standard dose and patients with less aggressive tumors get lower dose in those studies?

    I would probably start off with standard dose Avastin until the tumor progression and edema is brought under control, then you could perhaps lower the dose later.

    2) I don't think there is harm in taking Avastin if EGFR is amplified, there is just an association with less chance of being effective, but it would still be worth trying.

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