• Christoph Pöttgen, Wilfried Eberhardt, Andreas Grannass, Soenke Korfee, Georg Stüben, Helmut Teschler, Georgios Stamatis, Horst Wagner, Bernward Passlick, Volker Petersen, Volker Budach, Hans Wilhelm, Isabel Wanke, Herbert Hirche, Hans-Jochen Wilke, and Martin Stuschke.
• Department of Radiotherapy, Institute for Biomathematics and Statistics, University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany. christoph.poettgen@uk-essen.de
• J. Clin. Oncol. 2007 Nov 1; 25 (31): 4987-92.

PurposeTo investigate the role of prophylactic cranial irradiation (PCI) within a trimodality protocol (chemotherapy, chemoradiotherapy, surgery) for patients with operable stage IIIA non-small-cell lung cancer (NSCLC).Patients And MethodsAfter mediastinoscopic staging, patients with operable stage IIIA NSCLC were enrolled to a German multicenter trial and randomly assigned to receive either primary resection followed by adjuvant thoracic radiation therapy (50 to 60 Gy; arm A) or preoperative chemotherapy (cisplatin/etoposide [PE]; three cycles) followed by concurrent chemoradiotherapy (PE plus 45 Gy; 1.5 Gy twice per day) and definitive surgery (arm B), respectively. Patients in arm B were scheduled to receive PCI (30 Gy; 2 Gy daily fractions).ResultsOne hundred twelve patients were randomly assigned between November 1994 and July 2001. One hundred six patients were eligible (arm A: 51, arm B: 55), 90 males and 16 females, 50 with squamous cell, 16 with large cell, five with adenosquamous, and 35 with adenocarcenoma (median age, 57 years; range, 37 to 71 years). Forty-three patients received PCI as scheduled in arm B. Eleven long-term survivors (arm A: four; arm B: seven) underwent a comprehensive neuropsychological examination. PCI significantly reduced the probability of brain metastases as first site of failure (7.8% at 5 years v 34.7%; P = .02), the overall brain relapse rate was reduced comparably (9.1% at 5 years v 27.2%; P = .04). A slightly reduced neurocognitive performance in comparison with the age-matched normal population was found for patients in both treatment groups. No significant difference between patients who were treated with or without PCI could be noted.ConclusionPCI is effective in preventing brain metastases following this aggressive trimodality approach. Neurocognitive late effects are not significantly different between patients treated with or without PCI.

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