Effect of study-level factors on treatment-free remission rate in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

As it is recommended that most assessments for treatment-free remission (TFR) in patients with chronic myeloid leukemia be conducted as prospective trials, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to investigate which study-level factors affected the TFR rate. The MEDLINE, Embase, and Cochrane databases were systematically searched from inception to July 2018. A random effect model was used to estimate the overall mean TFR rate, subgroup differences, and regression coefficients with continuous variables. Overall, 12 tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) stopping studies comprising 1699 chronic myeloid leukemia patients were included in this analysis. The overall mean TFR rate at 24 months after entering TFR phase was 55% [95% confidence interval (CI) 0.51–0.58]. Trials with molecular criteria of MR4.5 or better for stopping TKI reported higher TFR rates than those of MR4.0 (57.2% vs. 50.5%). Trials with eligible criteria for at least 24 months of deep molecular response (DMR) duration demonstrated higher TFR rates than those for 18 or 12 months (60.2% vs. 49.9%). Our results suggest that TKI stopping trials with sufficient duration of DMR and molecular criteria of MR4.5 or better may account for approximately 60% of the TFR rate at 24 months after stopping TKI.