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Elderly patients with symptomatic myelodysplasia (MDS) who are ineligible for allogeneic stem-cell transplantation usually receive hypomethylating agents (HMAs), either azacitidine or decitabine. However, the long-term survival of these patients and whether one drug is superior to the other have not been established.
To examine these issues, academic investigators analyzed 336 patients (age, ≥66 years) with refractory anemia with excess blasts (RAEB) who were entered in the Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Medicare-linked database between 2004 and 2009; 79% of these patients had received azacitidine, and 21% had received decitabine.
Median overall survival (OS) for all patients was 11 months (95% confidence interval, 10–12 months),…