175 Late toxicity of radiotherapy in elderly patients with head and neck cancer

Abstract

Information about late toxicity of radiotherapy (RT) in the elderly is rare. Yet late effects are irreversible and must be evaluated also in this range of age. We studied 1588 patients (pts) with head and neck cancers enrolled in EORTC trials and receiving RT. Late toxicities were examined uniquely if they occurred before an eventual tumor failure in order to avoid confusion between effects of first and second line treatments. Thus, we evaluated the probability of occurrence of toxicity in function of time with Kaplan-Meier method. Logrank test was used to compare toxicity in each age range from 50 years to 75 years and more. In such conditions, 751 pts were available for analysis of which 645 had late toxicity grade≥ 1 for a total of 981. The mean time of occurrence of late toxicity was 2.2 years and was not statistically different in all age groups. The logrank test showed a significant difference between ages (χ 2 = 21.023,6 df, P = 0.002) but the logrank test for linear trend was not significant (χ 2 = 0.242, 1 df, P = 0.62). In conclusion, it is clear that in this study late toxicity occurrence was not relied to age.