Impact of chemotherapy-induced neutropenia (CIN) and febrile neutropenia (FN) on cancer treatment outcomes: An overview about well-established and recently emerging clinical data

Beyond its role as a surrogate prognostic marker, high-grade CIN may have an unexpected predictive role in clinical practice, as illustrated by several data relating CIN occurrence with favorable survival outcomes; this may be due to the fact that body surface area (BSA) - based calculation of dose may not fully account for the pharmacokinetics (PK) of cytotoxic drugs and the fact that there may be variability in drug metabolism between patients treated with same chemotherapy regimens.