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Despite advances in surgical, medical, and radiation therapy for pancreatic cancer, the prognosis remains poor. At this time, the only chance for long-term survival is surgical resection. More challenging is the optimal management of unresectable locally advanced pancreatic cancer, which has historically been treated with concurrent chemoradiation or chemotherapy alone. However, the survival and local control benefit of conventional radiotherapy in addition to chemotherapy was unclear. More recently, stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) is emerging as a viable approach to maximizing local tumor control with a tolerable side effect profile. SBRT achieves sharp dose fall-off facilitating safe delivery of highly focused radiation to the tumor over 1-5 days. Although the optimal regimen of pancreas SBRT has not yet been established, its short treatment course limits the delay of additional. Future directions involve prospective study of pancreas SBRT and exploration of biomarkers and imaging technology in order to adopt a personalized management paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Age- and sex-specific estimates of the rate of cardiac morbidity among Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) patients treated with doxorubicin-based chemotherapy and radiation therapy (RT) are scarce. We evaluated the risk of hospital admission for cardiac disease in 615 HL patients, adjusting for age, sex, treatment, cardiac risk factors and competing causes of death. Compared with the general population, the risk of cardiac morbidity was highest among patients treated with both doxorubicin and mediastinal RT (HR = 2.77, p < 0.0001). Mediastinal RT without chemotherapy also significantly increased the risk (HR = 1.82, p = 0.038). For females and males treated with doxorubicin plus mediastinal RT at age 40, the estimated 15-year incidence rate of cardiac hospitalisation were 7.3% and 16.5%, respectively, rates 5-15% higher than expected. These results suggest that the risk of clinically important cardiac toxicity following HL treatment that includes both doxorubicin and mediastinal RT may be greater than that reported in prior studies of patients treated with RT alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]