Acta oncologica
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Psychological distress (PD) has a major impact on quality of life. We studied the incidence of PD before and after radiotherapy for painful bone metastases. Furthermore, we aimed to identify factors predictive for PD. ⋯ A substantial proportion of patients had a high level of PD before and after radiotherapy for painful bone metastases. Most patients who reported high levels of PD when referred for palliative radiotherapy remained at high levels thereafter. Therefore, screening of PD prior to treatment seems appropriate, in order to select patients requiring intervention.
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The increased linear energy transfer (LET) at the end of the Bragg peak causes concern for an elevated and spatially varying relative biological effectiveness (RBE) of proton therapy (PT), often in or close to dose-limiting normal tissues. In this study, we investigated dose-averaged LET (LETd) distributions for spot scanning PT of prostate cancer patients using different beam angle configurations. In addition, we derived RBE-weighted (RBEw) dose distributions and related normal tissue complication probabilities (NTCPs) for the rectum and bladder. ⋯ Compared to using constant RBE, the variable RBE models predicted increased biological doses to the rectum, bladder and prostate, which in turn lead to substantially higher estimated rectum and bladder NTCPs.
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Multicenter Study
Comparison of PET and CT radiomics for prediction of local tumor control in head and neck squamous cell carcinoma.
An association between radiomic features extracted from CT and local tumor control in the head and neck squamous cell carcinoma (HNSCC) has been shown. This study investigated the value of pretreatment functional imaging (18F-FDG PET) radiomics for modeling of local tumor control. ⋯ Both CT and PET radiomics showed equally good discriminative power for local tumor control modeling in HNSCC. However, CT-based predictions overestimated the local control rate in the poor prognostic validation cohort, and thus, we recommend to base the local control modeling on the 18F-FDG PET.
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Admittance to specialized palliative care (SPC) has been discussed in the literature, but previous studies examined exclusively those admitted, not those with an assessed need for SPC but not admitted. The aim was to investigate whether admittance to SPC for referred adult patients with cancer was related to sex, age, diagnosis, geographic region or referral unit. ⋯ In this first nationwide study of admittance to SPC among patients with a SPC need, we found difference in admittance according to age, diagnosis and region. This indicates that prioritization of the limited resources means that certain subgroups with a documented need have reduced likelihood of admission to SPC.