Combined modality treatment in unresectable extrahepatic biliary carcinoma

Combined External Beam and Intraluminal Radiotherapy for Irresectable Klatskin Tumors

“…He even observed a trend that brachytherapy might decrease survival time, a hypothesis our data do not support. Morganti et al [12] treated his patients by 50.4 Gy external beam irradiation, 30-50 Gy brachytherapy and 1 000 mg/m 2 /d 5-fluorouracil at days 1-4 of radiotherapy and achieved a median survival time of 13 months. Stages or Bismuth types are rarely reported in the published studies.…”

Chemoradiation May Prolong Survival of Patients with Non-Bulky Unresectable Extrahepatic Biliary Carcinoma

“…Patients with BTC have a poor prognosis with median survival time (ST) between 6-24 months and 5-year overall survival (OS) rates of 15-25% [7]. Complete resection remains the only therapy that offers the possibility of long-term survival, but most patients present with unresectable disease (about 90%) and more than half of the resected patients relapse within 1 year [9,13,23].…”

“…Radiotherapy (RT) alone, including external-beam RT (EBRT) and intraluminal brachytherapy (IBT) [28], may relieve symptoms and contribute to biliary decompression but do not substantially increase survival rates in unresectable disease (reviewed in [12]). 5-fluorouracil-(5-FU-)based chemoradiation (CRT) has been performed in the adjuvant [14,29,30] definitive setting [1,6,9,23] for patients with BTC, and improved survival has been reported.…”

High dose chemoradiation for unresectable hilar cholangiocarcinomas using intensity modulated external beam radiotherapy: a single tertiary care centre experience

“…High dose chemoradiation for unresectable hilar cholangiocarcinomas using intensity modulated external beam radiotherapy: a single tertiary care centre experience and Cisplatin or combined chemoradiation (7,8) after biliary drainage. Addition of radiation is shown to prolong the patency of stent and also improve survival (9).…”