Radiation therapy in the elderly: More side effects and complications?

Can Elderly Patients With Newly Diagnosed Glioblastoma be Enrolled in Radiochemotherapy Trials?

“…Many researchers showed the impact of CCI on survival for several tumors mainly when it is > 3 50,51 ; few data are available for GBM, even if it is easy to think that comorbidity could influence the compliance with chemoradiation also in these patients. 52 The MGMT evaluation was available in 61 elderly patients (55%) and confirmed its prognostic value as shown by Brandes and colleagues. 5,53,54 In conclusion, our data show that a single prognostic factor, such as age, is insufficient to candidate elderly patients to a palliative approach.…”

Laser Surgery for Early Glottic Cancer

“…Also Colasanto et al suggested that age did not correlate with local relapse rate in patients with early laryngeal cancer 16 . A final observation regarding radiotherapy in elderly patients may be made: radiotherapy failure patients almost always required total laryngectomy and showed an increase in post-surgical complications 12 - 16 .…”

“…Compared to surgery, radiotherapy has the advantage to be a nonsurgical treatment and to be a simple, non-operator dependent technique, but the radiotherapy-related side-effects and the impact of acute and late side-effects of such a long treatment in elderly patients’ quality of life are still a matter of debate. Jaime Gomez reported that the tolerance to radiation in these patients might be impaired 12 and Allal et al, underlined how, for this reason, treatment interruptions were more common in older patients 13 . Pignon et al reported how acute and late toxicities were similar in elderly and in younger patients treated with radiotherapy for a head and neck carcinoma, even though older patients had more severe functional acute toxicity and late effects may decrease quality of life 14 .…”

Radiothérapie et sujet âgé

“…Partant de ce principe, les patients âgés ne bénéficient pas nécessairement d'un traitement optimal par irradiation [6]. Cependant, des essais récents ont permis de mieux définir certains traitements.…”