A trial looking at antibiotics for people with cancer to help stop infections (SIGNIFICANT)

Cancer type:

All cancer types

Status:

Results

Phase:

Phase 4

This trial looked at an antibiotic called levofloxacin to help stop infections in people having chemotherapy.

Chemotherapy weakens the immune system. This makes it more likely that people will pick up an infection and have a fever. This large trial looked at using either levofloxacin or dummy drug (placebo Open a glossary item ) for 7 days after chemotherapy treatment when the risk of developing an infection is highest.

The trial compared levofloxacin with the dummy drug to find out

How well levofloxacin works to stop infections in people having chemotherapy
If patients should have levofloxacin between every chemotherapy cycle or not
More about the side effects

Summary of results

The trial team found that levofloxacin is a useful treatment to help stop infections in cancer patients having chemotherapy.

The trial recruited 1,565 cancer patients having more than one cycle of chemotherapy

Half had dummy drug (placebo)
Half had levofloxacin

The researchers analysed the results in 2005. They looked at how many people had a fever due to an infection and how often this happened. They also looked at the number of times people had to go into hospital because they had a fever.

They found that during the whole course of chemotherapy, fewer people in the levofloxacin group had fevers compared to the people in the placebo group. And that the levofloxacin group had fewer hospital admissions because of this.

We have based this summary on information from the team who ran the trial. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed Open a glossary item ) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team. We have not analysed the data ourselves.