This retrospective review does not suggest a preferred regimen with which to combine bevacizumab, and future results of new phase III trials are needed to address this question. The factors associated with improved OS on multivariate analysis were use of maintenance therapy and female sex. Subgroup analysis of the AVAiL trial also showed a better prognosis for female patients exposed to bevacizumab, but the E4599 study suggested the opposite,

i.e. better outcomes for male patients than for female patients (HR for OS 0.70 [95% CI 0.57–0.87] vs 0.98 [95% CI 0.77–1.25], respectively). In the analysis reported herein, the median age of the sample used for OS estimation was adopted as a marker of age division (specifically, 62.9 years). This does not mean that we classified patients above that age as elderly; rather, we explored differences in outcomes comparing selleckchem both percentiles of age distribution. In this analysis, we were not able

to detect any influence of age on survival outcomes. With respect to the maintenance therapy advantage, patients who were able to initiate this phase were nonprogressors, and it was expected that they learn more would have better survival than patients not receiving maintenance therapy, considering that the majority of patients did not initiate maintenance therapy because of tumor progression. Although our analysis did not compare use of maintenance therapy between nonprogressor patients to better analyze the value of this treatment, the median OS of these patients reported here (22.7 months) suggests that this strategy can offer an extended period of disease control for these patients, as has previously been demonstrated by phase III trials.[16,17] Given the limitations of our analysis, we cannot conclude that the use of maintenance therapy was responsible for greater OS in our

series of patients entering the maintenance phase. In addition, because of the limitations of our sample SPTLC1 size, we combined patients receiving bevacizumab as a single agent and those receiving it in combination with pemetrexed as maintenance therapy, which precludes any suggestion regarding specific regimens. Our safety results did not reveal any new safety signal, and the outcomes were consistent with those reported previously. The frequency of hypertension, which was the most frequent AESI, can be considered lower than those reported in the literature, considering both all-grade and high-grade events.[18] Arterial and venous thromboembolic events were the most frequent high-grade AESIs. According to meta-analyses, the overall incidence of arterial events during bevacizumab treatment is 2.6%[19] and that of high-grade venous thromboembolic episodes is 6.3%;[20] both are similar to our findings. Although the incidence of high-grade neutropenia in our study was higher than that in the SAiL trial[8] (23.