Over the last few years, researchers have noticed that cancer patients who get immunotherapy infusions in the morning seem to do significantly better than those who get treated later. Many scientists, even some who had published such observations, were doubtful that time of day could truly make a big difference.
“I was skeptical of this phenomenon even though we’ve replicated it in our hands,” said Sumanta Pal, a medical oncologist and cancer researcher at City of Hope who has conducted one such study. Income, location, frailty, and more could bias certain patients towards a morning or afternoon time, skewing the results of retrospective studies. “There’s a whole cadre of potential explanations for why we saw what we saw,” Pal said.
