New Radiation Treatment is Better for Throat Cancer Patients, Research Shows

Researchers at the University of Iowa Department of Radiation Oncology and Department of Otolaryngology - Head and Neck Surgery are recommending new, intensity-modulated radiation therapy for treating a variety of throat cancers, saying that it can improve the patient's quality of life better than the conventional radiation therapy.

Oropharyngeal - throat - cancer, originates in the part of the throat - oropharynx.- just after the mouth. It can also be in the tonsils and th back of the tongue. Squamous cell carcinomas, which originate in from the cells that make up the lining of the mouth and throat make up in excess of 90% of oropharyngeal cancers.

Lately, the cancer has been occurring in a growing number of younger patients as well as in nonsmokers

The aim of the study was to get a comparison of the health related quality of life in the patients who were treated with the conventional CRT and the new IMRT.

With the CRT, two or three beams of radiation are aimed at the tumor, but the surrounding tissues and organs such as
the oral cavity and salivary glands, receive that same high dose as the tumor. In some of the patients, the salivary glands are totally destroyed and patients can also develop severe dryness in the mouth and a poor quality of life.

On the other hand, the IMRT uses multiple radiation beams and they are broken down into what they call beamlets. This gives the radiation oncologists the ability to target the radiation to the tumor much more accurately so that the surrounding healthy structures do not get damaged.

For the study, they chose 53 patients who were in the database of the Outcomes Assessment Project funded by
National Institutes of Health, which is a study that was begun more than 10 years ago. Its purpose is to document the outcomes from patients with cancers of the upper aerodigestive tract. They split the patients into two groups, 26 received the IMRT and 27 the CRT.