Patients’ characteristics
In this study, we considered 78 patients with chronic viral infection
who were treated at Jiangsu Cancer Hospital with the PD-1 inhibitor
alone or in combination with the chemotherapy and/or the bevacizumab
therapy, and their clinical and pathological baseline characteristics
are shown in Table 1. The median age of the 78 patients was 65 years,
including 62 males and 16 females. Adenocarcinoma was the most common
pathological type (56.4%), followed by squamous cell carcinoma
(35.9%). Most of the patients (88.5%) were clinically diagnosed with
stage IV lung cancer. Out of 78 patients, 60 were suffering from NSCLC
with a history of hepatitis B (including 57 patients with past hepatitis
B and 3 patients with chronic hepatitis B), 2 NSCLC patients had the
record of hepatitis C, and 16 with syphilis. All patients received
PD-1/PD-L1 immune checkpoint inhibitors, including 10 patients were
treated with monotherapy and 68 patients were prescribed with the
combination chemotherapy/bevacizumab. Most of the patients (67.9%)
received the PD-1 inhibitor-based therapy as second- or late-line
therapy and most of the patients (87.2%) did not received combined
radiotherapy. Most patients (85.9%) had an ECOG performance status of 0
or 1.