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Radiotherapy dose may be determined on individual basis
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A blood test may help physicians provide personalized radiotherapy and select the optimal radiation dose for patients.
“Although radiotherapy is a highly effective way of treating cancer, it is important that we are able to identify the patients who will react badly to it and adjust their dosage accordingly,” said
Dirk De Ruysscher, MD, PhD, a radiation oncologist at University Hospital Maastricht in the Netherlands.
Researchers from Belgium, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands examined patients with hypersensitivity to radiotherapy from the database of the GENEPI study. They established a tissue bank containing skin fibroblasts, whole blood, lymphocytes, plasma and lymphoblastoid cell lines and compared them with a control group.
Eleven patients were hypersensitive. Patients with hypersensitivity demonstrated severe adverse effects at low radiation levels; severe adverse effects lasting more than four weeks postradiotherapy and/or requiring surgery; or severe late adverse effects lasting more than 90 days post-therapy. Severe adverse effects included acute skin reactions, acute diarrhea, extreme skin fibrosis, myelitis and skin edema.
“We hope that the European Union will fund a successor project to elucidate genetic pathways in combination with other patient data so that we can make predictive models that can be implemented in standard clinical practice,” De Ruysscher said.
De Ruysscher D. #O-2007.