However, survival benefits have been most convincingly demonstrated in the realm of improved systemic therapies. That is, the increased survival seen is certainly due in part to the success of gemcitabine-based (4) and FOLFIRINOX (5) chemotherapy in slowing the systemic spread of disease. This is not to say that local control is irrelevant to survival. Local control has been shown to significantly impact survival in other cancer types when systemic disease is effectively controlled (6). However, the typical method used to report local control can hide its importance in diseases #selleck inhibitor keyword# that commonly
metastasize systemically. Patients are generally censored from the analysis at the time of death. Thus, favorable-appearing rates of local control can be misleading, and as survival improves, local control can appear to worsen as there is more time for Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical locally advancing disease to become clinically apparent. When systemic control improves, local control becomes a more important metric in disease and symptom control (7). In pancreatic cancer, local progression is likely the direct cause of death in a large proportion of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical patients. It has been shown that around 30% of patients with pancreatic cancer
die with local progression alone (8-10) and 10-25% more experience local progression along with distant spread before death (9-11). Furthermore, because of Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical close proximity to vital organ systems, local progression from pancreatic cancer is extremely morbid, and current treatment options are limited. For these reasons it is imperative to investigate methods to improve local control in this disease. In this issue of the Journal of Gastrointestinal Oncology, Wild and colleagues
report their experience with re-irradiation using stereotactic Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical body radiation therapy (SBRT). Eighteen patients treated at two institutions were identified. Patients received re-irradiation with SBRT for isolated local recurrence after surgery and multimodality from therapy (15 patients), or isolated local progression after definitive chemotherapy and radiation (3 patients). All patients received gemcitabine maintenance therapy and had no evidence of distant metastasis prior to re-irradiation with SBRT. The median re-irradiation dose was 25 Gy in 5 fractions. The authors report a median survival from the time of SBRT of 8.8 months (95% CI of 1.2-16.4 months). Effective symptom palliation occurred in 4 of 7 patients who reported abdominal or back pain prior to SBRT. Rates of toxicity were acceptable with only 5 cases (28%) of grade 2 acute toxicity, no cases of grade ≥3 acute toxicity, and only 1 case (6%) of grade 3 late toxicity. These results are encouraging, but proper patient selection is essential.
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