External beam radiotherapy performance has been increased by the emergence of state-of-the-art techniques, which improve local irradiation while preserving surrounding organs.
The most important factors to consider regarding choosing chemotherapy are the side effect profiles of the medication, use of concurrent radiotherapy, performance status of the patient, patient and carrier preference, and total cost difference between the various chemotherapy regimens.
Exploratory subgroup analyses demonstrated that the addition of bevacizumab to chemotherapy provided survival benefit irrespective of tumor stage, weight loss, previous radiotherapy, race, performance status, and age.
Other inclusion criteria were age ⩾18 years, no prior (or concomitant) chemo- or radiotherapy, ECOG performance status 0 1 and adequate bone marrow, liver and renal function.
There were significant differences between the survivors and the non-survivors regarding age, tumour location, TNM stage, weight loss before radiotherapy, WHO performance score, treatment modality, and radiotherapy on the neck nodes (Table 1).
Eligibility criteria included the following: no earlier chemotherapy or radiotherapy, Karnofsky performance (KP) status ⩾60, age ⩾18 years, predicted survival ⩾12 weeks, adequate bone marrow, liver, renal and cardiac function, adequate biliary drainage, no known brain metastases, no previous malignancy, no serious concurrent medical illness and, where applicable, approved methods of birth control.
Despite their established role in radiotherapy planning their performance and clinical applicability has to be continuously adapted to evolving complex treatment techniques such as adaptive radiation therapy (ART).
Inclusion criteria were as follows: histologically confirmed NSCLC; medically inoperable or locally advanced NSCLC (stage I III); no previous radiotherapy given; Karnofsky performance status ≥70%; life expectancy ≥6 months.
Patient characteristics, including age, weight at randomization, prior adjuvant chemotherapy or radiotherapy, and ECOG performance status are presented in Table 1.
A treatment planning study was performed to evaluate the performance of new radiotherapy techniques based on non-coplanar multiple fields or on dynamic conformal arcs for early stage breast treatments.
The most commonly used instrument to estimate survival objectively in patients with brain metastases is the recursive partitioning analysis (RPA) [ 8, 9] which relates overall survival after whole-brain radiotherapy (WBRT) to Karnofsky performance status (KPS), extracranial tumour status and age [ 10, 11].
