Chemotherapy in the Elderly

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Abstract
Sargent et al. (Oct. 11 issue)1 report that adjuvant chemotherapy with fluorouracil is as effective in older patients with resected colon cancer as it is in younger patients. Their conclusion is based on the absence of a statistically significant interaction between age and treatment effect for both overall and disease-free survival. However, the survival curves for treated and untreated patients who were more than 70 years old seem closer than the curves for treated and untreated younger patients. In our opinion, the absolute gain in survival is the measure that should be discussed with patients when deciding whether to use an adjuvant treatment. We suspect that the absolute differences in the study by Sargent et al. were small, and we would like to know what the absolute gain in survival was at each year of follow-up.