A significant proportion of lung cancer patients also have autoimmune disease, which may make them unsuitable for increasingly popular immunotherapy treatments, a team of researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center's Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center has found.
The UT Southwestern cancer researchers calculated that between 14 to 25 percent of lung cancer patients reviewed also had immune disease, and these individuals were more likely to be female and older, according to the findings reported in JAMA Oncology.
The results are significant because the use of immunotherapy for cancer treatment is expanding, and clinical trials of immunotherapy have routinely excluded patients with autoimmune disease, a population estimated to be between 20 to 50 million people in the U.S.
