Quantification of patient to patient variation of skin erythema developing as a response to radiotherapy

Describing patients' normal tissue reactions: Concerning the possibility of individualising radiotherapy dose prescriptions based on potential predictive assays of normal tissue radiosensitivity

“…Treated in this way, the variation in acute erythema has an approximately Gaussian distribution (Fig. 1c), exactly as demonstrated by Glicksman et al (1960) (Fig 1a) and Russell et al (1994) (Fig. 1b).…”

“…This range of reactions is seen even in patient groups as small as 30-40 treated for the same condition with the same dose (Figs. 1b, 2) (Turesson and Thames, 1989;Tucker et al, 1992;Russell et al, Glicksman et al, 1960). (b) Distribution of acute reactions, defined as the rate of increase of redness measured spectrophotometrically, in 38 patients receiving breast radiotherapy (redrawn from Russell et al, 1994).…”

Comparison of three instrumental methods for the objective evaluation of radiotherapy induced erythema in breast cancer patients and a study of the effect of skin lotions

“…Furthermore, the absence of a universal skin reaction rating scale makes it difficult to compare results from different studies [5]. Thus, two different grading systems were used in a trial investigation on the toxicity of Aloe vera gel in the management of radiotherapy induced skin reactions.…”

Single dose irradiation response of pig skin: a comparison of brachytherapy using a single, high dose rate iridium-192 stepping source with 200 kV X-rays.

“…A limitation in this method is the confounding in¯uence of moist desquamation or pigmentation in the irradiated area on the outcome of these measurements. Comparative studies showed a lack of correlation between visual observation and re¯ectance spectrophotometry measurements [52,53]. In the present study, doses were chosen such that there were always skin ®elds showing moist desquamation and erythema at the same time.…”