Radiation therapy is routinely used for tumors of the head and neck. It may be used in the primary setting as the sole treatment or after surgery as adjuvant therapy. It may be given by itself or with chemotherapy. Recently, immunotherapy has emerged as an adjunct to radiation therapy. Cetuximab, or epidermal growth factor inhibitor, has been shown to improve cure rates for oral cancer when given with radiation therapy.
Generally radiation therapy is given once a day five days per week. The radiation schedule is termed “fractionation” and standard fractionation refers to treatment once a day Monday through Friday. Other schedules have been used to intensify treatment for more advanced tumors and this is called accelerated fractionation or in some instances hyperfractionation. Oral complications are related to the site radiated, the total radiation dose, the fractionation schedule and integration with other cancer therapies such as chemotherapy. Most tumors of the head and neck region are squamous cell carcinoma, which require relatively high doses of radiation for local tumor control. Typically 50 Gray (Gy) of radiation, which corresponds to a five week course, is needed for microscopic disease control and 70 Gy is needed for gross tumor control. Chemotherapy must also be used to control locally advanced tumors. Most radiation for head and neck tumors is given externally, where the patient lies on a table and the machine spins on an axis to deposit radiation from different directions.
Prior to approximately 1995, radiation was often given using opposed lateral portals, meaning that all the tissue between the portals received the same dose. In figure 1a this is represented as a constant shade of gray throughout the exposed area. Over the last 10-15 years, most centers have adopted what is called intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT). With this method, the radiation beam is not static and the blocks in its way are constantly moving so radiation can be deposited in a specific pattern. Planning for IMRT involves a team of physicians, physicists and dosimetrists. An IMRT treatment plan for oropharyngeal carcinoma is shown in Figure 1b where higher radiation doses are represented by the darker shading and lower doses are represented by progressively lighter shading. As illustrated, the high dose or “hot spot”, represented by the darkest shading, can be localized in the tumor and surrounding tissues are preferentially spared. In this case the darkest tumor area would receive approximately 70 Gy and the lightest area of the anterior mandible would receive only 25 Gy. Perhaps the greatest contribution of IMRT is sparing of the parotid glands. Numerous authors have shown that if the mean dose to the parotid can be limited to 24-26 Gy, reasonable salivary flow can be maintained. Of course, there is still some collateral irradiation to other tissues and while high doses to normal oral mucosa or mandible, for example, can be avoided, low doses to a larger volume often occur, and the clinical significance of this is still uncertain. This dose gradient, however, is critical when performing dental evaluations on patients who have received IMRT, since the dose to certain regions of the mandible will differ, as is evident in Figure 1b. The radiation oncologist should furnish dental specialists with the actual isodose plan so that they can determine exactly what dose was received when making post-radiation management decisions. Unfortunately, this information is not available to the dentist before radiation is given, so it cannot be used for pre-radiation decisions.