Hair-sparing Whole Brain Radiotherapy

Ghent University Hospital (UZ)

Status and phase: Terminated; Phase 2

Conditions: Brain Metastases; Small Cell Lung Cancer

Treatments: Radiation: Whole brain radiotherapy with volumetric arc therapy

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT01421316

2011/504

Details and patient eligibility

About

Up to 10% of patients with cancer will develop symptomatic brain metastases. Given this limited survival it is important to consider quality of life (QOL) when treating these patients. Whole brain radiotherapy (WBRT) can increase survival to 6 month. However, WBRT itself has been shown to reduce QOL by increasing drowsiness, leg weakness and hair loss in patients with brain metastases. Both fatigue and hair loss were reported to have the largest decline in QOL scores when WBRT is used in the prophylactic setting in small cell lung cancer. Recent technological improvements in patient positioning and treatment planning will allow us to treat the whole brain with reduced margins, allowing better sparing of the scalp. In view of the large impact of hair loss on quality of life, the investigators hypothesize to see an improved quality of life with scalp sparing techniques.

Study hypothesis: Volumetric arc therapy results in a reduced hair loss and a subsequent clinically important improvement in QOL.

Enrollment: 29 estimated patients

Sex: All

Ages: 18+ years old

Volunteers: No Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Brain metastases
• Age ≥ 18 years.
• Signed informed consent
• Recursive Partitioning Analysis (RPA) class III patients
• Recursive Partitioning Analysis (RPA) class I-II patients and >3 brain metastases
• Patients with small cell lung cancer extended disease eligible for prophylactic Whole-Brain Radiotherapy (WBRT).

Exclusion criteria

• Previous whole brain radiotherapy

Trial design

Primary purpose: Treatment

Allocation: Non-Randomized

Interventional model: Single Group Assignment

Masking: None (Open label)