Cancervård mer effektiv på förmiddagen än på eftermiddagen

Researchers recently tried an experiment: Gather people who had the same kind of lung cancer and put them on the same type of treatments to fire up their immune systems. The only difference was that half the group got their medications earlier in the day, before 3 p.m., and the other half got them later.

The surprise finding was that the time of day made a difference: Patients who got their first rounds of treatments in the morning had, on average, about five more months before their cancers grew and spread, a measure doctors call progression-free survival — and they lived almost a year longer than those who got their treatments later. They also had better odds of being alive at the end of the study, which has been running for more than two years.

But there are questions about why the time of day would be so impactful when immunotherapies are active in the body for weeks after they’re given through IV infusion. The study authors say it’s a valid question and one they can’t answer yet.