Abstract
Radiation therapy in ovarian cancers has been considered an outdated concept for many years, mainly due to toxicity and failure to show benefit in terms of survival. Chemotherapy has been extensively used after surgery for these cancers and it has almost replaced radiation therapy as an adjuvant treatment. Nevertheless, failures in ovarian cancers continue to occur even with the use of newer and effective chemotherapy regimens. About 70% patients demonstrate recurrence in the abdomen or pelvis after first line chemotherapy in ovarian cancers. With advances in technology and sophistication of radiation techniques, along with the molecular and biological knowledge of distinct histological subtypes, there is a need to redefine the role of radiation therapy. This review article focuses on the literature on use of radiation in ovarian cancers and its rationale and indications in the present day. For this, a literature pub med/medline search was performed from January 1975 to March 2014 to redefine the role of radiotherapy in ovarian cancers.
Highlights
Ovarian cancer is the fourth most frequent fatal malignancy in women and the leading cause of death from gynecological malignancies
With these not very satisfying results achieved during the last decade with chemotherapeutic regimens, there has been resurgence of interest in the use of radiotherapy in ovarian cancers
In order to evaluate the role of radiotherapy in ovarian cancer, we conducted a literature search from January 1975 to March 2014, through the pub med/medline central database at National center for biotechnology information (NCBI) website using the search terms, “Ovarian cancer”, “radiation WKHUDS\μZKROHDEGRPHQUDGLRWKHUDS\μLQYROYHGÀHOG radiotherapy” so as to discuss the present day role of radiation in ovarian cancers in this review article
Summary
Ovarian cancer is the fourth most frequent fatal malignancy in women and the leading cause of death from gynecological malignancies. Radiotherapy has been tried in ovarian cancers in the literature as a single curative modality, as part of a combined modality approach in early and advanced stage cancers as adjuvant and consolidative therapies respectively, as salvage therapy for patients with small volume persistent disease after primary cytoreductive surgery and chemotherapy, and as palliative therapy in metastatic settings.
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