Interpretation of follow-up cervicovaginal smears after radiation therapy

Radiation has been used as a form of therapy alone or in combination with surgery and/or chemotherapy for a variety of malignant tumors. Its application in the treatment of gynecological cancers, particularly those of the uterine cervix, has been particularly successful, radiation therapy being recognized as the treatment of choice for infiltrating epidermoid carcinoma of the cervix that has spread to tissues beyond the cervix. The following discussion of cellular findings in cervicovaginal smears describes the cellular alterations and the types of changes that may cause difficulty in interpretation, reports on the attempts at correlating the reaction of benign squamous cells to radiation with prognosis, and reviews the value of long-term follow-up by cytology