Optimal Therapy Discovered for Vocal Cord Cancer

The researchers used clinical data from a large national database in the US, from the period 2004 to 2013, for the study. The study group consisted of 10,212 patients diagnosed with stage 1 or 2 glottic cancer. Most of the patients, 6,182 (60.5%) in number, were treated with CFX. The rest, 4030 patients (39.5%) were treated with HFX.

The results of the study show that for patients treated with definitive radiotherapy for ESGC cancer, HFX radiotherapy treatment resulted in improved survival compared to CFX radiotherapy treatment. This was especially the case for patients with stage 2 ESGC.

Lead author of the study, Assistant Professor Zain A. Husain, MD, said, “This is an important finding as the optimal fractionation for early stage glottic cancer has long been an area of controversy. These results strongly support hypofractionation as a preferred treatment approach. It is also reassuring to that our results show the utilization of hypofractionation has been increasing considerably.”