Multicenter study of superficial bladder cancer treated with intravesical bacillus Calmette-Guérin or adriamycin

We evaluated 155 patients with superficial bladder cancers (Stages Ta, T1, and TIS) and treated them with either intravesical bacillus Calmette-Guérin (Tice strain) (BCG) or doxorubicin hydrochloride (Adriamycin), in a multicenter nonrandomized study. At present 140 of these patients in treatment Groups I and II are being followed up. With additional follow-up, BCG continued to produce a higher percentage of complete remissions (71%) than doxorubicin (54%). The percentage of incomplete remission with BCG (7%) was half that with doxorubicin (14%). Half of the patients whose initial therapy failed had complete remission after additional therapy. However, for patients with recurrence, additional follow-up shows a recurrence rate per 100 patient-months for BCG (1.0) only slightly lower than that for doxorubicin (1.1). The percentage of progressions continued to be higher with BCG (8.5%) than with doxorubicin (5%), but the difference between these results for the two drugs proved slightly less than we reported previously. Of the patients in this study, 2.5 percent (all treated with BCG) required cystectomy. A comparison of the results of our study with those of 13 other studies using BCG to treat bladder cancer indicates that therapy beyond an initial course of 6 weekly treatments increases the percentage of complete response. All of the studies showed that the greatest improvement in percentage of complete response occurred with the second course of treatment. The value of maintenance therapy cannot yet be determined, since few studies have used that protocol. The percentage of patients requiring cystectomy in studies with fewer than 20 treatments was 2.2 times higher than in studies with more than 20 treatments.