Excellent functional outcome in patients with squamous cell carcinoma of the base of tongue treated with external irradiation and interstitial iodine 125 boost

Abstract

Patients with cancer of the BOT can be treated effectively with an interstitial boost utilizing I-125 seeds. Overall, local control is excellent and complications are minimal. Of greatest significance, organ preservation with excellent understandability of speech and diet tolerance was achieved in 90% of the patients.

Interstitial High-Dose-Rate Brachytherapy in the Treatment of Base of Tongue Carcinoma

“…The rate of severe late radiation complications was also low (3%). In other studies this rate was reported in the range of 0-10% [1,18,21,32,35]. It is also to be noted, that 2/10 (20%) patients with local failure were successfully salvaged and cured, yielding an ultimate crude local tumor control of 73% (22/30).…”

“…The standard treatment of early stage (T1-2) base of tongue cancer is surgery or radiotherapy alone or surgery with postoperative radiotherapy [17,20,21,22,31,32,36]. Local control for patients with early stage (T1-2) disease treated with surgery (± adjuvant radiotherapy) or radiotherapy (EBI ± brachytherapy) have been reported in the range of 77-100% and 56-100%, respectively, in a retrospective, nonrandomized, multi-institutional, pooled analysis [32].…”

Treatment of Oral Cavity and Oropharyngeal Cancer

“…5-year local control rates in 243 patients were between 67% (T3 tumors) and 87% (T1/2 tumors). Similar results (see Table 1) were reported from other centers [17,32,34,35,36,39,75].…”

Treatment of recurrent gynecologic malignancies with iodine-125 permanent interstitial irradiation

“…Thus, interstitial implants are volume implants and the potential shortcomings of dose heterogeneity may be anticipated by studying preexisting interstitial programs. The most common application of 125 I permanent interstitial irradiation has been in the treatment of prostatic malignancies (29 -31), although therapy for other sites of disease, such as central nervous system, head-and-neck tumors, and pancreatic cancer has also been described (32)(33)(34)(35).…”