Case reports on cancer therapies: the urgent need to improve the reporting quality

Current guidelines for certain cancer therapies mainly provide recommendations for therapy options treating the primary tumors. However, first-choice treatments for advanced or metastasizing tumors are described only rarely if at all. In such cases, one or more individual treatment options are chosen by the physician depending on the medical need of the patient and considering the acceptance of this treatment by the patient. Often, well-known drugs are selected with a different dosing than is indicated in the drug information leaflet. In other cases, drugs not yet approved for this particular type of cancer are used off label or certain therapies are used in combination or consecutively in a manner not reported before. With the increasing research on personalized medicine, particularly in treating cancer, case reports on innovative drug therapies or newly developed surgical interventions may provide extremely valuable information in instances where randomized controlled trials may not be feasible (eg, because of a low patient number or ethical considerations).