Two Decades of Randomised Hyperthermia Clinical Trials: Lessons for the Future

摘要

Local-regional failure in patients treated with radiotherapy is a major contributing factor in approximately one-third of cancer-related deaths. Patients with tumours at sites with high risk for local-regional failure after conventional treatment are excellent candidates for enrollment in adjuvant regional hyperthermia clinical trials. Furthermore, improvement in regional tumour control can result in lower rates of distant metastases for a variety of tumours treated with radiation therapy, including cancers of the uterine cervix (2) and prostate. Local-regional radiation therapy can also result in improved survival in patients with axillary node positive breast cancer following surgery and chemotherapy. The initial anecdotal successes of combined radiation therapy + hyperthermia treatments led to confirmatory trials using historical controls treated with radiation therapy alone and matched pair comparisons of radiation therapy and radiation therapy + hyperthermia. Subsequently, phase III trials were undertaken to confirm the efficacy as well as establish toxicities of the adjuvant use of hyperthermia.