Weekly Cisplatin-Based Concurrent Chemoradiotherapy for Treatment of Locally Advanced Head and Neck Cancer: a Single Institution Study

Background: The organ preservation approach of choice for the treatment of locally advanced head and neckcancers is concurrent chemoradiation with three weekly high doses of cisplatin. Although this is an efficacioustreatment policy, it has high acute systemic and mucosal toxicities, which lead to frequent treatment breaksand increased overall treatment time. Hence, the current study was undertaken to evaluate the efficacy ofconcurrent chemoradiation using 40 mg/m2 weekly cisplatin. Materials and
Methods: This is a single institutionalretrospective study including the data of 266 locally advanced head and neck cancer patients who were treatedwith concurrent chemoradiation using 40 mg/m2 weekly cisplatin from January 2012 to January 2014. A p-valueof < 0.05 was taken to be significant statistically for all purposes in the study.
Results: The mean age of the studypatients was 48.8 years. Some 36.1% of the patients had oral cavity primary tumors. The mean overall treatmenttime was 57.2 days. With a mean follow up of 15.2 months for all study patients and 17.5 months for survivors,3 year local control, locoregional control and disease free survival were seen in 62.8%, 42.8% and 42.1% of thestudy patients. Primary tumor site, nodal stage of disease, AJCC stage of the disease and number of cycles ofweekly cisplatin demonstrated statistically significant correlations with 3 year local control, locoregional controland disease free survival.
Conclusions: Concurrent chemoradiotherapy with moderate dose weekly cisplatin isan efficacious treatment regime for locally advanced head and neck cancers with tolerable toxicity which canbe used in developing countries with limited resources.