Is Stereotactic Body Radiotherapy (SBRT) in lymph node oligometastatic patients feasible and effective?

ObjectivesTo review the available data about stereotactic body-radiotherapy (SBRT) for oligometastatic lymph node cancer recurrence.MethodsThe inclusion criteria for this study were as follows: Medline search for the (1) English language (2) full paper (abstracts were excluded) on (3) adult oligometastatic solid cancer recurrence limited to lymph node that underwent SBRT (4) outcome data available and (5) published up to the 30th April 2014.Results38 papers fulfilling the inclusion criteria have been found: 7 review articles and 31 patient series (20 and 11 retrospective and prospective studies, respectively) including between 1 and 69 patients (636 lymph nodes). Twelve articles reported only lymph node SBRT while in 19 – all types of SBRT including lymph node SBRT were presented. Two-year local control, 4-year progression free survival and overall survival was of up to 100%, 30% and 50%, respectively. The progression was mainly out-field (10–30% of patients had a recurrence in another lymph node/nodes). The toxicity was low with mainly mild acute events and single grade 3–4 late events. When compared to SBRT for any oligometastatic cancer, SBRT for lymph node recurrence carried better prognosis and showed lower toxicity.ConclusionsSBRT is a feasible approach for oligometastatic lymph node recurrence, offering excellent in-field tumor control with low toxicity profile. The potential abscopal effect has been hypothesized as a basis of these findings. Future studies are warranted to identify the patients that benefit most from this treatment. The optimal combination with systemic treatment should also be defined

From technological advances to biological understanding: The main steps toward high-precision RT in breast cancer.

Radiotherapy improves local control in breast cancer (BC) patients which increases overall survival in the long term. Improvements in treatment planning and delivery and a greater understanding of BC behaviour have laid the groundwork for high-precision radiotherapy, which is bound to further improve the therapeutic index. Precise identification of target volumes, better coverage and dose homogeneity have had a positive impact on toxicity and local control. The conformity of treatment dose due to three-dimensional radiotherapy and new techniques such as intensity modulated radiotherapy makes it possible to spare surrounding normal tissue. The widespread use of dose-volume constraints and histograms have increased awareness of toxicity. Real time image guidance has improved geometric precision and accuracy, together with the implementation of quality assurance programs. Advances in the precision of radiotherapy is also based on the choice of the appropriate fractionation and approach. Adaptive radiotherapy is not only a technical concept, but is also a biological concept based on the knowledge that different types of BC have distinctive patterns of locoregional spread. A greater understanding of cancer biology helps in choosing the treatment best suited to a particular situation. Biomarkers predictive of response play a crucial role. The combination of radiotherapy with molecular targeted therapies may enhance radiosensitivity, thus increasing the cytotoxic effects and improving treatment response. The appropriateness of an alternative fractionation, partial breast irradiation, dose escalating/de-escalating approaches, the extent of nodal irradiation have been examined for all the BC subtypes. The broadened concept of adaptive radiotherapy is vital to high-precision treatments

Salvage radical prostatectomy after external beam radiation therapy: A systematic review of current approaches

Background: Radical external beam radiotherapy (EBRT) is a standard treatment for prostate cancer patients. Despite this, the rate of intraprostatic relapses after primary EBRT is still not negligible. There is no consensus on the most appropriate management of these patients after EBRT failure. For these patients, local salvage therapy such as radical prostatectomy, cryotherapy, and brachytherapy may be indicated. Objective: The objectives of this review were to analyze the eligibility criteria for careful selection of appropriate patients and to evaluate the oncological results and complications for each method. Methods: A review of the literature was performed to identify studies of local salvage therapy for patients who had failed primary EBRT for localized prostate cancer. Results: Most studies demonstrated that local salvage therapy after EBRT may provide long-term local control in appropriately selected patients, although toxicity is often significant. Conclusions: Our results suggest that for localized prostate cancer recurrence after EBRT, the selection of a local treatment modality should be made on a patient-by-patient basis. An improvement in selection criteria and an integrated definition of biochemical failure for all salvage methods are required to determine which provides the best oncological outcome and least comorbidity

A Real-World, Multicenter, Observational Retrospective Study of Durvalumab After Concomitant or Sequential Chemoradiation for Unresectable Stage III Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer

Introduction: For unresectable stage III non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the standard therapy consists of chemoradiotherapy (CRT) followed by durvalumab maintenance for responding patients. The present study reports on the safety and outcome of durvalumab use after CRT in a real-world, multicenter, retrospective cohort. Methods: Two hundred thirty-eight patients have been included. We collected data on systemic therapy, radiation therapy, the timing between CRT and durvalumab, number of durvalumab cycles, reasons for non-starting or discontinuation, incidence and grade of adverse events (AEs), and progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Results: One hundred fifty-five patients out of 238 (65.1%) received at least one durvalumab dose: 91 (58.7%) after concomitant CRT (cCRT) and 64 (41.3%) after sequential CRT (sCRT). Programmed-death ligand 1 (PD-L1) status was unknown in 7/155 (4.5%), negative in 14 (9.1%), and positive ≥1% in 134/155 (86.4%). The main reasons for non-starting durvalumab were progression (10.1%), PD-L1 negativity (7.5%), and lung toxicity (4.6%). Median follow-up time was 14 months (range 2–29); 1-year PFS and OS were 83.5% (95%CI: 77.6–89.7) and 97.2% (95%CI: 94.6–99.9), respectively. No significant differences in PFS or OS were detected for cCRT vs. sCRT, but the median PFS was 13.5 months for sCRT vs. 23 months for cCRT. Potentially immune-related AEs were recorded in 76/155 patients (49.0%). Pneumonitis was the most frequent, leading to discontinuation in 11/155 patients (7.1%). Conclusions: Durvalumab maintenenace after concurrent or sequential chemoradiation for unresectable, stage III NSCLC showed very promising short-term survival results in a large, multicenter, restrospective, real-world study. Durvalumab was the first drug obtaining a survival benefit over CRT within the past two decades, and the present study contributes to validating its use in clinical practice

Reirradiation of head and neck squamous cell carcinomas: a pragmatic approach-part I: prognostic factors and indications to treatment.

INTRODUCTION Reirradiation (reRT) of locally recurrent/second primary tumors of the head and neck region is a potentially curative treatment for patients not candidate to salvage surgery. Aim of the present study is to summarize available literature on both prognostic factors and indications to curative reRT in this clinical setting. MATERIALS AND METHODS A narrative review of the literature was performed on two topics: (1) patients' selection according to prognostic factors and (2) dosimetric feasibility of reRT. Postoperative reRT and palliative intent treatments were out of the scope of this work. RESULTS Patient-tumor and treatment-related prognostic factors were analyzed, together with dosimetric parameters concerning target volume and organs at risk. Based on available evidence, a stepwise approach has been proposed aiming to provide a useful tool to identify suitable candidates for curative reRT in clinical practice. This was then applied to two clinical cases, proposed at the end of this work. CONCLUSION A second course of RT in head and neck recurrence/second primary tumors is a personalized approach that can be offered to selected patients only in centers with expertise and dedicated equipment following a multidisciplinary team discussion

Immunosuppressive treatment and radiotherapy in kidney transplant patients: A systematic review

BACKGROUND Immunosuppression (IS) therapy may contribute to cancer development. Some authors have proposed to reduce immunosuppression drugs dose in case of viral infections, in immunosuppression-related diseases, and in patients undergoing radiotherapy. The present analysis reports the results of a systematic review on kidney transplant recipients undergoing immunosuppression and radiotherapy. AIM To define if it is necessary reduce immunosuppression drugs during radiotherapy. METHODS The literature search was based on three electronic databases (Pubmed, Scopus, and Web of Science) using selected keywords linked through the "AND " and "OR " Boolean operators to build specific strings for each electronic search engine. Two researchers independently screened the citations, and disagreement was resolved by discussion or through the intervention of a third author. The review was conducted and reported according to the PRISMA statement. Extracted data were narratively synthesized, and, where possible, frequencies, percentages, and ranges were calculated. RESULTS The literature search resulted in 147 citations. After abstracts screening, 21 records were selected for full-text evaluation. Fifteen of these were excluded, leaving six papers considered suitable for analysis. There is still no clear evidence that withdrawing antimetabolites and/or calcineurin inhibitors and/or mammalian target of rapamycin-inhibitors, as opposed to continuing maintenance IS, improves patient survival in kidney transplant recipients with cancer undergoing radiotherapy. Only few retrospective studies on small cancer patient cohorts are available in this setting, but without comparison of different immunosuppression treatments. Even where immunosuppression therapy was described, patient survival seemed to be correlated only with cancer stage and type. CONCLUSION The results of this systematic review do not support the reduction of immunosuppression dose in patients undergoing radiotherapy

Impact of image filtering and assessment of volume-confounding effects on CT radiomic features and derived survival models in non-small cell lung cancer

BACKGROUND No evidence supports the choice of specific imaging filtering methodologies in radiomics. As the volume of the primary tumor is a well-recognized prognosticator, our purpose is to assess how filtering may impact the feature/volume dependency in computed tomography (CT) images of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), and if such impact translates into differences in the performance of survival modeling. The role of lesion volume in model performances was also considered and discussed. METHODS Four-hundred seventeen CT images NSCLC patients were retrieved from the NSCLC-Radiomics public repository. Pre-processing and features extraction were implemented using Pyradiomics v3.0.1. Features showing high correlation with volume across original and filtered images were excluded. Cox proportional hazards (PH) with least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) regularization and CatBoost models were built with and without volume, and their concordance (C-) indices were compared using Wilcoxon signed-ranked test. The Mann Whitney U test was used to assess model performances after stratification into two groups based on low- and high-volume lesions. RESULTS Radiomic models significantly outperformed models built on only clinical variables and volume. However, the exclusion/inclusion of volume did not generally alter the performances of radiomic models. Overall, performances were not substantially affected by the choice of either imaging filter (overall C-index 0.539-0.590 for Cox PH and 0.589-0.612 for CatBoost). The separation of patients with high-volume lesions resulted in significantly better performances in 2/10 and 7/10 cases for Cox PH and CatBoost models, respectively. Both low- and high-volume models performed significantly better with the inclusion of radiomic features (P<0.0001), but the improvement was largest in the high-volume group (+10.2% against +8.7% improvement for CatBoost models and +10.0% against +5.4% in Cox PH models). CONCLUSIONS Radiomic features complement well-known prognostic factors such as volume, but their volume-dependency is high and should be managed with vigilance. The informative content of radiomic features may be diminished in small lesion volumes, which could limit the applicability of radiomics in early-stage NSCLC, where tumors tend to be small. Our results also suggest an advantage of CatBoost models over the Cox PH models

3D-printed boluses for radiotherapy: influence of geometrical and printing parameters on dosimetric characterization and air gap evaluation

The work investigates the implementation of personalized radiotherapy boluses by means of additive manufacturing technologies. Boluses materials that are currently used need an excessive amount of human intervention which leads to reduced repeatability in terms of dosimetry. Additive manufacturing can solve this problem by eliminating the human factor in the process of fabrication. Planar boluses with fixed geometry and personalized boluses printed starting from a computed tomography scan of a radiotherapy phantom were produced. First, a dosimetric characterization study on planar bolus designs to quantify the effects of print parameters such as infill density and geometry on the radiation beam was made. Secondly, a volumetric quantification of air gap between the bolus and the skin of the patient as well as dosimetric analyses were performed. The optimization process according to the obtained dosimetric and airgap results allowed us to find a combination of parameters to have the 3D-printed bolus performing similarly to that in conventional use. These preliminary results confirm those in the relevant literature, with 3D-printed boluses showing a dosimetric performance similar to conventional boluses with the additional advantage of being perfectly conformed to the patient geometry

Quality of life changes over time and predictors in a large head and neck patients' cohort: secondary analysis from an Italian multi-center longitudinal, prospective, observational study-a study of the Italian Association of Radiotherapy and Clinical Oncology (AIRO) head and neck working group

Purpose: The present study examined the longitudinal trajectories, through hierarchical modeling, of quality of life among patients with head and neck cancer, specifically symptoms burden, during radiotherapy, and in the follow-up period (1, 3, 6, and 12&nbsp;months after completion of radiotherapy), through the M.D. Anderson Symptom Inventory Head and Neck questionnaire, formed by three factors. Furthermore, analyses were conducted controlling for socio-demographic as well as clinical characteristics. Methods: Multi-level mixed-effects linear regression was used to estimate the association between quality of life and time, age, gender, household, educational level, employment status, ECOG performance status, human papilloma virus (HPV) status, surgery, chemotherapy, alcohol intake, and smoking. Results: Among the 166 participants, time resulted to be a predictor of all the three questionnaire factors, namely, general and specific related symptoms and interference with daily life. Moreover, regarding symptom interference with daily activities factor, HPV-positive status played a significant role. Considering only HPV-negative patients, only time predicted patients' quality of life. Differently, among HPV-positive patients, other variables, such as gender, educational level, alcohol use, surgery, age at diagnosis, employment status, and ECOG status, resulted significant. Conclusion: It was evident that quality of life of patients with head and neck cancer declined during RT, whereas it slowly improved after ending treatment. Our results clarified the role of some socio-demographic and clinical variables, for instance, HPV, which would allow to develop treatments tailored to each patient

Salvage stereotactic body radiotherapy for isolated lymph node recurrent prostate cancer : single institution series of 94 consecutive patients and 124 lymph nodes

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