[Current studies of sequential methotrexate and 5-fluorouracil treatment in cancer chemotherapy]

This paper reviews the data on the clinical studies of sequential methotrexate and 5-fluorouracil in advanced colorectal, gastric, head and neck, and breast cancer. To date, a lot of phase II studies have been conducted, but there are many distance in each clinical data concerning response rate and side effect by the difference between their clinical methods with respect to the interval between methotrexate and 5-fluorouracil, or the dosage of each drugs. There are several reports with high response rate in those phase II studies, but randomized controlled studies recently reported have not yet confirmed the sequential effect of MTX-5-FU treatment. Therefore, it is concluded that the randomized controlled studies with the most available methods must be performed to evaluate the true efficacy of sequential methotrexate and 5-fluorouracil treatment.