The cardiac-related adverse events of PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapy in advanced or metastatic lung cancer: a RCT-based meta-analysis

This study aims to investigate the effect of PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapy on cardiac-related adverse events in patients with advanced or metastatic lung cancer.

We conducted a detailed search in PubMed, Web of Science, Cochran, and Embase for articles on the application of immunotherapy for lung cancer and report cardiac-related adverse events with respect to myocardial ischemia, pericardial effusion, myocarditis, and electrophysiology. The dichotomous variables were assessed by relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CI).

A total of 7132 subjects were included in 12 phase III randomized controlled trials (RCTs). The results showed that under the fixed effects model, the probability of cardiac-related adverse events in pericardial effusion was higher in the experimental group than in the control group (RR 2.30, 95% CI 1.01–5.21, P = 0.05). Under the random effects model, there was no statistical difference between the two groups (RR 2.03, 95% CI 0.81–5.12, P = 0.13). No statistical difference is observed between the experimental group and the control group (under the fixed effects model and the random effects model) for other cardiac-related adverse events, including myocarditis, acute coronary syndrome, myocardial infarction, acute myocardial infarction, myocardial ischemia, unstable angina, ventricular tachycardia, supraventricular tachycardia, tachycardia, bradycardia, atrial flutter, atrial fibrillation, cardiac failure, cardiac arrest, cardiopulmonary failure, acute heart failure, cardiac arrest (all P > 0.05).

PD-1/PD-L1 immunotherapy in advanced or metastatic lung cancer is generally safe for cardiac-related adverse events.