~ 4000 Times the Price of Gold

I made a house call on an 90 year old patient yesterday.  He lives with his wife in an idyllic house surrounded by vernal gardens and a wetland preserve.
 

The patient was presented on VGRD in 2014 with a desmoplastic melanoma of the scalp that measured > 7.5 mm thick.  Since that time, he has done reasonably well.  A metastatic lymph node was excised from the r. preauricular area ~ 4 years ago.  He was doing well until early May, 2020 when he developed right upper quadrant pain.  The ER work-up suggested non-ST-elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) and he was admitted to a local hospital.  There, elevated LFTs were noted and scans confirmed presence of multiple liver masses (largest being 3 cm diameter) and enlarged mesenteric lymph nodes (largest 3.6  cm diameter). A supraclavicular l.n. was biopsied that showed metastatic melanoma.

Significant co-morbidities include recent osteomyelitis (left foot) for which he is currently on oral medication (doxycycline), HTN, gout and the recent NSTEMI, and ischemic cardiomyopathy with a depressed EF (25-30%).

Medications: metoprolol, lisinopril, Plavix, Lipitor, allopurinol, and ASA

He is a high functioning nonagenarian who lives independently with his wife and until the past few months was doing well.

His oncologist is recommending Ketruda (pembrolizumab).  When I spoke with the patient a few days ago he told me that the oncologist said Ketruda was well-tolerated, but when I checked the oncologist’s notes the recorded discussion of side-effects ran 12 lines on the office note. 

Yesterday, the patient gave me a printout he independently made.  After he and his wife read it, and he now has doubts.  His quality of life is good, he enjoys his home, meals, and an occasional dram of Johnny Walker Black… he spoke of quality of life over a few extra months.  He’s done all he wanted to do in life.

We plan to sit down this week in my office and have a more formal discussion.

His metastatic lesions were discovered incidentally as a result of hospitalization for his NSTEMI.  Is this a good sign that pembro will be helpful, or at this time do the risks outweigh the benefits?  When the randomized studies were done with pembro, were nonagenarians with cardiomyopathy or significant co-morbidities excluded?

Your thoughts will be appreciated. 

Postscript: A week after I saw him, he had a PET scan.  The next day, he developed profound weakness. He took to his bed.  Stopped eating and drinking.  He became stuporous and died two days after the scan attended to by his loving wife and a caring nurse.  The day after he died, his oncologist called with the PET scan results.  His liver was entirely replaced with tumor.  He told her that Ketruda was not indicated in such a situation.  He lived reasonably well until two weeks before he died.

Reference
1. Few people actually benefit from ‘breakthrough’ cancer immunotherapy
By Nathan Gay and Vinay Prasad. March 8, 2017. Stat Topics.  [We will try to see if the authors still believe this]
2. Alyson Haslam, Vinay Prasad  Estimation of the Percentage of US Patients With Cancer Who Are Eligible for and Respond to Checkpoint Inhibitor Immunotherapy Drugs. JAMA Netw. 2019 May 3;2(5):e192535.  Free Full Text at PMC.

3. Madhuri Bhandaru, Anand Rotte  Monoclonal Antibodies for the Treatment of Melanoma: Present and Future Strategies. Methods Mol Biol. 2019;1904:83-108.  A Review