Planned combined radiotherapy and surgery

Though the planned combined use of surgery and radiation has been shown to be beneficial for other tumors, the authors feel that the present evidence is far from persuasive in demonstrating a definite superiority of combined therapy over surgery or radiation alone for advanced laryngeal tumors. The actuarial or disease-free survival rates for patients treated with combined therapy have not been significantly increased over those obtained with a single modality in any randomized, well-controlled study, although the trend is toward improved local regional control. Many of the retrospective studies are probably flawed by selection bias; the patients selected for combined treatment generally have more advanced cancers and represent a worse prognostic group. It is clear from this review that the positive value of irradiation for advanced transglottic and supraglottic tumors needs to be documented by a controlled study that compares surgery alone with salvage radiation at time of recurrence to surgery plus adjuvant radiation. The authors feel that such a study is needed to put to rest the present controversy before they can advocate a course of treatment that is expensive, time-consuming, and difficult for the patients to tolerate owing to severe acute side effects and potentially morbid late effects (xerostomia, necrosis) that can greatly lessen the quality of life for these patients