Description

For bladder cancer, conventional concurrent chemoradiotherapy is irradiated with a daily radiation dose of 1.8-2.0 Gy each, a total of 64 Gy or more, and the radiation treatment period takes more than 6 weeks in bladder preserving protocol. Concurrent chemoradiotherapy has the advantage of bladder preservation, but gastrointestinal, genitourinary, and hematologic side effects occur in about 5%. Hypofractionated radiotherapy has the advantage of increasing the radiation-biological effect on tumors by reducing the number of treatments instead of increasing the daily dose, and shortening the overall treatment time. On the other hand, hypofractionated radiotherapy can also increase the risk of side effects related to treatment because the radiologic effects on normal tissues also increase. However, the biological effect of radiation on normal tissues can be reduced by applying intensity-modulated radiation therapy in hypofractional radiation therapy to reduce radiation exposure to normal tissues. Clinical studies of concurrent chemotherapy with hypofractionation radiation therapy are still in its insignificant stage.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the side effects, quality of life, and treatment effects of concurrent chemo-hypofractionated intensity-modulated radiation therapy in bladder cancer.

The 2-year bladder conserving disease-free survival rate after the existing concurrent chemo-radiation therapy is known to be about 55%, and when concurrent chemo-hyofractionated intensity-modulated radiation therapy is performed in invasive bladder cancer, the 2-year bladder conservation disease-free survival rate is expected about 70%. The number of patients required to verify this was 80% power, a significance level of alpha = 0.1, recruitment of patients for 3 years, and taking into account the follow-up observation for 2 years after recruitment, and setting the dropout rate of 15%, a total of 53 patients was necessary.

Twenty fractionation within 4 weeks are performed using hypofractionated intensity-modulated radiation therapy. As for the radiation dose, 2.8-3.2 Gy at a time, total dose 56-64 Gy, to the high-risk target volume, and 2-2.2 Gy at a time, and 40-44 Gy, respectively, to the low-risk target volume. It aims to include more than 97% of the total dose to cover the entire PTV, and the minimum dose in the PTV is not lower than 95% of the prescribed dose, and the maximum dose does not exceed 107% of the prescribed dose. Chemotherapy before and after radiotherapy can be performed depending on the institutional policy. Among radiotherapy, chemotherapy is performed with platinum-based agents (cisplatin, carboplatin, etc.), and is administered once a week for a total of 3 or more.