Irena Ilic

RESEARCH ARTICLE Bevacizumab Combined with Chemotherapy Improves Survival for Patients with Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: Evidence from Meta Analysis Irena Ilic1☯*, Slobodan Jankovic2, Milena Ilic3☯ 1 Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, Serbia, 2 Department of Pharmacology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, Serbia, 3 Department of Epidemiology, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Kragujevac, Kragujevac, Serbia ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. *- a11111 Abstract Background OPEN ACCESS Citation: Ilic I, Jankovic S, Ilic M (2016) Bevacizumab Combined with Chemotherapy Improves Survival for Patients with Metastatic Colorectal Cancer: Evidence from Meta Analysis. PLoS ONE 11(8): e-. doi:10.1371/journal. pone- Editor: Yu-Jia Chang, Taipei Medical University College of Medicine, TAIWAN Received: March 13, 2016 Colorectal cancer is one of the leading causes of cancer deaths in both sexes in the world. Improvement of existing therapy modalities and implementing new ones in order to improve survival of patients with colorectal cancer represents a great challenge for medicine. The aim of this paper was to assess the impact that adding bevacizumab to chemotherapy has on survival in patients with metastatic colorectal cancer, compared to the use of chemotherapy alone. Methods Hazard ratios (HRs) with their 95% confidence intervals (CI) were determined from the studies and pooled. Two-sided p values were reported and considered to indicate statistical significance if less than 0.05. Accepted: August 15, 2016 Published: August 31, 2016 Copyright: © 2016 Ilic et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the paper. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. Results A total of 12 studies that meet the inclusion criteria were identified in the literature search, 3 phase II studies and 9 phase III studies. Based on the random effects meta-analysis, a statistically significant improvement was identified for both overall survival (HR = 0.84; 95% CI: 0.74–0.94; p = 0.003) and progression free survival (HR = 0.64; 95% CI: 0.55–0.73; p