A recent research study suggests that extending chemo therapy sessions for lung cancer patients will delay the return of the cancer. The current practice is to give patients with advance lung cancer four courses of two chemotherapy medications and wait until it returns.

The Spanish scientists admit that the results are still preliminary but they said that staying on pemextrexed (Alimata) delayed the return of the disease.

Dr. Neal Ready, a professor at the Duke Cancer Institute, said that this is the first study with positive results where the same treatment is continued. He said that most of the similar studies with positive results required changing the chemotherapy regimen. Ready added that even though they do not have the overall survival rate yet, this study will highly influence oncologists to continue chemotherapy treatment following the standard combination.

In this research study, nearly a thousand patients with advanced lung cancer were given the standard four course treatment of Alimta and cisplatin. 539 patients whose condition stabilized were randomly chosen to receive continued dose of Alimta or a placebo.

Those who took Alimta lived around 4.1 months without the recurrence of the disease in contrast to 2.8 months in the group which took placebo.

Dr. Luis Paz-Ares, study author, said that there was a significant decrease of the progression of lung cancer which they believe is enough to support the use of the treatment regimen in a clinical context.

The findings were presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology annual meeting Sunday. In addition, the study is funded by Lilly, the makers of Alimta.