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Background: Hyperthermia has been included in the 2013 National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) guidelines as an option for the treatment of breast recurrences. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate the important role of hyperthermia as a therapeutic modality by presenting clinical trials on this subject carried out in the last decades. Materials and Methods: All relevant trials published since 1987 were retrieved from Medline and reviewed. Results: Results show that the addition of hyperthermia to radiotherapy and/or chemotherapy for the treatment of breast cancer enhances treatment response and can increase local control. Conclusion: Further studies are required to evaluate potential benefits of hyperthermia in the treatment of other kinds of superficial tumors.

Hyperthermia is an effective modality for the treatment of cancer, which is mainly used in conjunction with radiotherapy as this combined treatment offers a better clinical outcome. There are many ways that hyperthermia can be applied and depends on the kind of tumor of the patients. The great advantage of this method is that it is tolerable for the majority of patients without severe toxicity. Many clinical trials have been realized in order to prove that hyperthermia in addition to radiotherapy offers an advantage in the survival and local control of patients in comparison to radiotherapy alone. Many studies have also investigated if exists any correlation between the thermal parameters of hyperthermia and the clinical outcome. This is a review of these studies and it concerns superficial hyperthermia for superficial tumors-melanoma, head and neck, breast cancer-and intracavitary hyperthermia for rectal cancer, esophageal cancer and prostate carcinoma.