Radiotherapy considerations in patients with Hodgkin's disease who receive mediastinal radiotherapy and anthracycline-containing chemotherapy.

Recent clinical work in breast cancer patients has demonstrated that increasing the cardiac volume encompassment within radiotherapy portals leads to greater cardiac morbidity. In Hodgkin's disease, anthracycline chemotherapy is currently favoured, although mantle radiotherapy after anthracycline chemotherapy carries enhanced cardiac toxicity risks. Where anthracycline-based chemotherapy has produced a good response, with centripetal shrinkage of mediastinal disease, considerable cardiac protection is afforded by subcarinal blocking, either after a specific radiation dose or even by truncating the radiation portal in the subcarinal region from the outset. In the eight patients presented here, standard mantle blocks screened 35% (+/-3.2 SE) of the cardiac volume, particularly the left ventricle, throughout radiotherapy. Subcarinal blocks screened an increasing proportion of the cardiac volume as the spinal level of the blocks became higher. This was shown to occur most steeply over the spinal level D9 to D7, the mean extracardiac volume protection over this range being 21% (+/-3.7% SE) to 56% (+/-4.1% SE). These cardiac protection data were calculated for other block placement levels. The routine adoption of subcarinal/ cardiac blocking is advocated, particularly in conjunction with anthracycline-based chemotherapy, in an attempt to reduce late cardiac morbidity resulting from chemoradiotherapy for Hodgkin's disease.