Assessment of Palliative Radiation Therapy for Cancer Patients

Abstract

The aim of this study is to assess the palliative radiotherapy for cancer patients who referred to Radiation and Isotopes Center in Khartoum. The analyzed data shows that: the most common cases referred to RICK for palliative radiotherapy were Ca. breast, Ca. bladder, Ca. cervix, Ca. thyroid and Ca. lung and they represented as 18%, 15%, 13.3%, 13.3%, and Ca. lung respectively. And the common involved region with late stage cancer is the Khartoum, West of Sudan and East of Sudan that representing 35%, 20% and 16.7% respectively. While the common applied dose for cancer palliation was 4000 cGy, 4500 cGy which were commonly used for palliation of cervical carcinoma, breast and the carcinoma of the bladder. The different tumor size as 12, 10, 8, 6, and 4 cm were response to radiation by shrinking in size following the increment of applied radiation dose in a form of exponential correlation which was so significant at R2 = 1 to 0.9 and the general equation that fits the relationship was as follow: , where y refers to tumor size in cm and x refers to the applied tumor dose in cGy. The data shows that there is significant effect of palliative treatment in the tumor size as it reduces the average tumor size from 7.2 to 1.9 cm with St. D. of ± 0.5 and the significant coefficient was R2 = 0.6 with reduction of 0.23 per each centimeter. On the other hand, the t-test has been done and showed that the significance level of dose effect in reducing tumor size was at P = 0.05 and t-level at 22.7