Ovarian Cancer

Summary:

Role and status of Whole Abdomen Radiotherapy

Ovarian Cancer

Nikhilesh Patil 01 Aug 2010 05:42

Dear all,
With recent advancements in high precision radiation delivery, there has been some interest in visiting Whole Abdomen Radiotherapy (WAR) for Ovarian malignancies.
Ref: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19628341
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18330510
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18188517
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19918228
there are many more articles in pubmed mainly from the German group, wanted to know what does our group think about WAR ?
Nikhilesh

Re: Ovarian Cancer

Rohit Malde 01 Aug 2010 10:43

No experience in this setting.
Traditional teaching has been WAR is useless and dead.
We need results from a well conducted Ph III trial in 10 years time before incorporating it into any useful discussion.
This remains EXPERIMENTAL treatment and should not be used or advocated outside the context of clinical trial.

This is gonna be difficult to ever come in clinical practice, with the amount of clinical trials already in place and i hear from ASCO 2010, Avastin has now had some positive results and licensed for maintenance treatment for ovarian cancer.

In 10 years time, God knows what else would be incorporated as Std Mgt of Ovarian cancers, PARP inhibitors, tyrosine kinases, mTOR inhibitors, ovarian cancer vaccines , then there will be second generation drugs of the same classes, etc

In my opinion, WAR will remain as a practising toy for the bored oncologists, but will never come in Routine Clinical Practice.