Answering Patients' Needs: Oral Alternatives to Intravenous Therapy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Metastatic colorectal cancer has traditionally been treated with i.v. 5-fluorouracil (5-FU), with or without leucovorin (LV). 5-FU is administered as either an i.v. bolus or a protracted infusion. Although schedules using the latter method offer efficacy benefits (objective response rate, time to disease progression), protracted infusion schedules are often associated with medical complications, inconvenience, high costs, and poor quality of life. Issues such as quality of life and convenience have influenced treatment decisions, but the availability of oral fluoropyrimidines represents a new development in this domain. Studies have confirmed that the majority of patients prefer oral to i.v. chemotherapy. Questionnaire-based studies have also demonstrated a preference for home-based rather than hospital-/clinic-based therapy. This preference was one of the driving forces behind the development of the oral fluoropyrimidines capecitabine (Xeloda) and uracil plus tegafur (UFT). Oral agents offer patients a more convenient treatment option that can be administered at home, providing patients with a greater sense of control over their therapy, while avoiding the medical complications and psychological distress associated with venous access. This article highlights some of the problems associated with i.v. therapy and reviews the available data on patient preference, including results of a recent, randomized, phase II study. It also provides a critical evaluation of the efficacy and safety profiles of the only two oral fluoropyrimidines approved for prescription, capecitabine and UFT/LV (UFT/LV not available in Germany and the U.S.), compared with those of two infused, 5-FU-based regimens. Finally, the results of an interactive debate exploring the opinions of approximately 400 oncologists on the issues of oral versus i.v. therapy are presented.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".