Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: clinical records on 17 patients

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Published on Tuesday, 24 September 2013

Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: clinical records on 17 patients treated with Di Bella's MethodM.D. Mauro Madarena - Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma: clinical records on 17 patients treated with Di Bella's Method

 

 

 

Material and Method

It was intended to check the Average Survival Time (AST) and the performance of Quality of Life (QoL) of 17 patients suffering from Pancreatic Adenocarcinoma in advanced stage (4th stage) treated with Di Bella's Method - DBM[*] from 1997 to date, both as first-line therapy (11 patients) and as second-line therapy in patients previously treated with chemotherapy and with disease progression (6 patients). All patients were inoperable at the moment of the diagnosis and at 4th stage.

The AST, expressed in months, was anyway determined from diagnosis, highlighting two subgroups: pretreated and non pretreated.

The Average Survival Time (AST), both Overall and in the two Subgroups, was compared with the AST taken from the best international studies published in the last years, for either patients treated with chemotherapy or control groups treated with Best Supportive Care (BSC).

The Quality of Life was appreciated according to the Karnofsky Scale (Performance Status) - see below - and according to the Kersh-Hazra's Pain Index.

 



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The survey data were collected on time Zero (start of DBM), on the 30th day and on the 60th day of the treatment with DBM, and were discerned 3 macro-classes:

  1. QoL Improvement: when has been found, in the context of the three measurements, improving of both the Performance Status and the Pain Index;
  2. QoL Stationary: when has been found either stability of the two parameters evaluated or improvement of only one of them;
  3. QoL Worsening: when it was found a worsening of at least one of the two parameters evaluated.

 

Results

The follow-up carried out on each patient (see also Table1 figure below) allows the following remarks:

 

Table1

Table 1 - Graph of survival time for individual patient

Table1

The Overall Average Survival Time was 13.6 months after diagnosis, versus 6.5 months of the better statistics related to anticancer therapies and versus 2.75 months of the best statistics in AST with BSC (Best Supportive Care).

Our data therefore seem to indicate an Average Survival Time of patients anyway treated with DBM[*] of at least two times higher than patients only treated with chemotherapy and nearly five times compared to that of patients treated with only supportive care.

Studying the two subgroups, Pretreated not Pretreated, we can do other interesting considerations, in fact:

  1. The AST of patients treated with DBM[*] after conventional chemotherapeutic treatments (see Table3 figure) was right 18.8 months, versus 6.5 months for the Overall Average Survival Time (approximately 3 times) and even superior to Overall Average Survival Time (see Table2 figure) in our study (13.6 months). This date reveals that patients who were able to carry both conventional treatments and DBM[*] therapy are those who have got the best Average Survival Time;
  2. The AST of patients treated only with DBM[*] (see Table4 figure) was 12.6 months, that is about 2 times over the median of reference for patients treated with chemotherapy alone (6.5 months) and 4 times more than those treated with only supportive care (2.75 months) but te other interesting sign is that this group of patients had an AST by about 30% lower than the group also treated with chemotherapy, as is well illustrated in the table of comparison (see Table5 figure);
  3. the number of pretreated patients enrolled represented, anyway, only 30% of patients (6 of 17), fact that should be carefully studied before re-evaluate the effectiveness of chemotherapy.

 

Table2

Average Survival Time

Table2
Table3

Pretreated patients

Table3
Table4

Patients not pretreated

Table4
Table5

Comparison: pre / naïve / reference

Table5

 

Quality of Life

Table6

Evaluation of quality of life

Table6

The assessment of Quality of Life (QoL) has shown that in patients usually very difficult to palliate, the DBM[*] has made an improvement of QoL in 65% of cases, a stabilization of the symptoms in 25% and an expected deterioration in only 12% of our statistics (see Table6 figure), all for an observation period of 90 days.

 

 

Conclusions and comments

Limited number of cases enrolled in our casuistry, not-belonging to certain "cultural circles", lack of official blessing by some multinational drug company, always represent a scientific limit which will usually give arguments to detract the evidence of the medical significance of these data to all those who want to read this work with anachronistic prejudice and sectorial pseudo-scientific rigour.

It remain us, however, the duty to highlight the value of the results obtained given the kind of treated pathology and especially the disease staging of patients.

The above explained data clearly indicate how the immunobiological therapy that we intended to evaluate, ie the so-called Multitherapy Di Bella Method - DBM[*], has had a deep impact both on increasing the survival and the Quality of Life (QoL) of patients; especially on those patients already subjected to chemotherapy.

In a disease in which results are read as acceptable and, sometimes with embarrassing emphasis, even increases of a few days in the average survival time are read as “good, encouraging, to be pursued” results, observing increases in the average survival times of "many months, doubled or even tripled" makes us proud, hearten our conscience and, at the same time, bitterly submerges us of embarrassing questions about ocular and/or neuronal and/or gastrointestinal blindness.

All even more striking if read in the light of the answers obtained in terms of Quality of Life, which sees fulfilled our medico-scientific expectations and, above all, human, in 90% of cases.

Hoping to have offered a small contribution of Freedom, in this new scientific Middle Ages where the role of the "Holy Inquisition" was hired by the vassals of the excessive power industry, I thank all those who want to evaluate these data simply for what they are.

 


 

 

[*] Di Bella's Method: oncology therapeutic methodology conceived by Prof. Luigi Di Bella, physiologist researcher at the University of Modena (Italy), who developed, between the years 1960-80, a therapeutic method for the treatment of tumors, not cytotoxic but immunobiological, based on: