The following is a summary of “Infectious Complications in Patients With Non-small Cell Lung Cancer Treated With Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors,” published in the November 2023  issue of Pulmonology by Guo, et al.

Standard care for people with non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) is immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI). However, there needs to be more information about how viral side effects affect ICI treatment. For a study, researchers sought to look back at all the NSCLC patients who were treated with ICIs at a top research center between 2007 and 2020. They used summary data to show how often infections happened, what infections there were, and how much healthcare was used during ICI treatment and within 3 months of stopping ICI therapy. Cox proportional hazard models determine how long people live without getting an illness based on their demographics and care. 

Logistic regression, which shows relationships between patient or treatment characteristics and being admitted to the hospital or ICU, looks at the data and shows them as odds ratios (OR). Of 298 patients, 54.4% (n = 162) got infections. 59.3% (n = 96) of these patients had to stay in the hospital, and 15.4% (n = 25) had to go to the intensive care unit (ICU). Bacterial pneumonia was the most common sickness. Twelve cases (7.4%) got fungal illnesses. People who had chronic obstructive lung disease (COPD) (OR 2.15, 95% CI, 1.01-4.58), corticosteroid treatment within one month of infection start (OR 3.04, 95% CI, 1.47–6.30), or both an infection and irAE at the same time (OR 5.48, 95% CI, 2.15–14.00) were more likely to need to go to the hospital. 

More people ended up in the intensive care unit (ICU) after taking corticosteroids (OR 3.09, 95% CI, 1.29–7.38).In the big, single-institution study, They found that more than half of people with NSCLC who are treated with ICI also get infections. They find that people with COPD, recent use of corticosteroids, and both irAE and infection are more likely to end up in the hospital and that strange infections like fungus can happen. It highlighted clinical awareness of infections as important complications during ICI therapy in patients with NSCLC.

Source: sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1525730423001377