Purpose: To describe the real-world treatment patterns of systemic therapies for biliary tract cancer (BTC) and to examine the frequency and management of biliary infection in Japan.
Methods: Patients diagnosed with BTC and prescribed systemic therapy between January 2011 and September 2020 were retrieved from the Japanese Medical Data Vision database. The look-back period was set to 5 years. Patient characteristics, treatment patterns, and biliary infection-induced treatment interruption were analyzed.
Results: The full analysis set comprised 22 742 patients with a mean age of 71.0 years and 61.6% were male. The most common BTC type was extrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (44.6%). The three most common first-line regimens were S-1 monotherapy (33.0%), gemcitabine+cisplatin (32.5%), and gemcitabine monotherapy (18.7%) over the entire observation period (January 2011-September 2021). Patients who received monotherapies tended to be older. Biliary infection-induced treatment interruption occurred in 29.5% of patients, with a median time to onset of 64.0 (interquartile range 29.0-145.0) days. The median duration of intravenous antibiotics was 12.0 (interquartile range 4.0-92.0) days.
Conclusions: These results demonstrated potential challenges of BTC in Japanese clinical practice particularly use of multiple regimens, commonly monotherapies, which are not recommended as first-line treatment, and the management of biliary infections during systemic therapy.
Keywords: antibiotics; chemotherapy; cholangiocarcinoma; cholangitis; drug therapy.
© 2024 The Authors. Journal of Hepato‐Biliary‐Pancreatic Sciences published by John Wiley & Sons Australia, Ltd on behalf of Japanese Society of Hepato‐Biliary‐Pancreatic Surgery.