Research Paper Volume 13, Issue 11 pp 15413—15432
Sex-related differences in the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors in malignancy: a systematic review and meta-analysis
- 1 Department of Oncology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China
- 2 Department of Pathology, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China
- 3 Department of Neurosurgery, The First Affiliated Hospital of Nanchang University, Nanchang, Jiangxi, China
Received: January 11, 2021 Accepted: May 14, 2021 Published: June 4, 2021
https://doi.org/10.18632/aging.203100How to Cite
Copyright: © 2021 Lai et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Although disease susceptibility is known to differ between men and women, it is controversial whether the efficacy of immune checkpoint inhibitors for malignancies also differs between the sexes. We conducted a meta-analysis to explore the impact of sex on immune checkpoint inhibitor treatment outcomes. We searched PubMed, Embase and the Cochrane Library databases from inception to October 1, 2020 for randomized controlled trials of immune checkpoint inhibitors with hazard ratios (HRs) stratified by sex. We calculated the pooled HRs for men and women using the ln(HR), and assessed the heterogeneity between the two estimates through an interaction test. In total, 22,268 patients from 39 randomized controlled trials were included. Immune checkpoint inhibitors yielded better overall survival than conventional agents in both men (HR: 0.75, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 0.71–0.80) and women (HR: 0.77, 95% CI: 0.70–0.85). Progression-free survival benefits were also observed in both men (HR: 0.64, 95% CI: 0.58–0.70) and women (HR: 0.67, 95% CI: 0.58–0.77) treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors. No sex differences in the response to immune checkpoint inhibitors were found when overall survival and progression-free survival were used as the endpoints.
Abbreviations
CTLA-4: cytotoxic T-lymphocyte-associated protein 4; PD-1: programmed cell death 1; PD-L1: programmed cell death 1 ligand 1; CI: confidence interval; HR: hazard ratio; NSCLC: non-small cell lung cancer; OS: overall survival; PFS: progression-free survival.