The Role of Roentgen Therapy in the Treatment of Bronchiogenic Carcinoma

Abstract

Bronchiogenic carcinomas are being treated by surgery, radium, roentgen therapy, and combinations of these procedures.

Attempts have been made to implant radon seeds or radium needles interstitially or to place other types of radium containers in apposition with the malignant tissue through bronchoscopes. Although apparently most carcinomas of the lung begin in major bronchi and near the hilum, radium treatment can be employed only in a few selected cases where the disease is so located that it is accessible through bronchoscopes or by some other equally simple surgical approach which facilitates the application of the radium containers. However, the sphere of therapeutic effectiveness of the radium radiation is only a few centimeters from its source; therefore, radium therapy has quite limited usefulness because in the majority of cases the carcinoma will have extended beyond its destructive influences. Also, it would seem that surgical excision would give better prospect of cure in the same types of localized growths for which radium treatment might be considered because of the accessibility of the tumor.

Undoubtedly, more patients with bronchiogenic carcinomas have been treated by roentgen therapy than by any other procedure. During the past ten years, a diagnosis of primary cancer of the lung has been made in sixty-three cases at the Cleveland Clinic. Of these, we have given roentgen therapy to thirty, most of the others having been too far advanced to justify treatment. Many of the patients were benefited; cough, pain, and hemoptysis were diminished but I cannot state that survival. . .