National Survey of Radiotherapy Fractionation Practice in 2003

Four Week Hypofractionated Accelerated Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy and Synchronous Carboplatin or Cetuximab in Biologically Staged Oropharyngeal Carcinoma

“…The use of a 4 week schedule of hypofractionated, accelerated radiotherapy for head and neck cancer was commonplace in the United Kingdom during the 1990's-2000's (James, Robertson, Squire, Jones, & Cottie, 2003;Williams, James, Summers, Barrett, & Ash, 2006;Tobias et al, 2009). This regimen has theoretical radiobiological advantages, as well as beneficial resource, cost and compliance implications over conventionally fractionated schedules (Fowler, 2007;.…”

Review of patterns of practice and patients’ preferences in the treatment of bone metastases with palliative radiotherapy

“…Only five studies audited the actual practices of radiation oncologists [11,26,32,46,51]. The results generated from hypothetical clinical cases may not be generalizable to actual clinical practice in the management of patients with bone metastases.…”

“…There was, however, some evidence of regional trends in terms of preferences for Table 2 Patterns of practice of radiation oncologists in the treatment of bone metastases [9,15,26,32,51] Author Table 3 Patterns of practice of radiation oncologists in the treatment of bone metastases [4,11,19,46] Author, year, location (reference) N (response rate) Population and setting Methods used to ascertain preferred RT regime [13,25,26,29,32,37]. In the UK, where the most recent audit was conducted in 2006, a single 8 Gy was the most common dose fractionation schedule employed [51]. This may suggest that in the UK, empirical evidence had contributed to the increased utilization of single fraction radiation.…”

“…Patterns of practice among radiation oncologists in the treatment of bone metastases Fifteen empirical studies on the patterns of practice of radiation oncologists were identified from 1988 to 2006 [4,9,11,13,15,17,19,25,26,29,32,37,40,46,51].…”

“…Given the results of this large randomized clinical trial conducted by American researchers [20], in conjunction with the large Bone Pain Trial Working Party [7] and Dutch Bone Metastases Study [44] trials, it seems worthwhile to investigate further the impact of the current evidence on practice patterns, particularly in the USA [22] where the most recent survey was published in 1998. As shown by Williams et al [51], the monitoring of trends in the future will indicate whether radiation oncologists are incorporating empirical evidence into their practice [22].…”