Spot Scanning Proton Therapy for Malignancies of the Base of Skull: Treatment Planning, Acute Toxicities, and Preliminary Clinical Outcomes

The tolerance of proton radiotherapy — preliminary results

“…the skull base or brain) and consisted of hair loss in 25.6% of cases, fatigue in 10.3% and headaches in 20.5%. In addition, these patients also experienced nausea (12.3%) and middle ear effusion (23.1%), in keeping with other published studies [18,19].…”

“…Clinicopathological and therapeutic characteristics of the 47 patient group undergoing proton radiotherapy of all SEs). Indeed, these observations are in line with those reported in other studies [11,[17][18][19]. Combs et al [20] studied proton and other ion therapies given to patients suffering from skull base or brain tumours and found that the most frequent stage SEs included hair loss in 37% of cases, and headaches and fatigue in 27% of cases.…”

“…A study by Grosshaus et al [19] on 15 patients with skull base tumours demonstrated that they all experienced side effects of either grade 1 or grade 2 intensity with the most common being low-grade fatigue (10 pts.) or nausea (8 pts.).…”

Review of photon and proton radiotherapy for skull base tumours

“…A few articles describe also the use of a mixed proton/photon beam (Table 5 [9][10][11][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102]. From the methodological point of view, the large majority of the studies are retrospective and may include different tumour types: chordoma, chondrosarcoma, and meningioma of grade I-III.…”

“…Local control and overall survival at 5 years were obtained in 59% and 79%, respectively, for chordoma and 75% and 100% for chondrosarcoma. 91 The review on chordoma and chondrosarcoma includes the results of proton radiotherapy delivered after one or more surgical resections (Table 5 [9][10][11][91][92][93][94][95][96][97][98][99][100][101][102] ). All series were treated to very high doses of up to 83 Gy (RBE).…”