We started superselective intra-arterial chemoradiotherapy from the superficial temporal artery in January 2006. When inserting a catheter from the superficial temporal artery, we adjusted the position of the catheter tip and also conducted arterial redistribution, which involves placing a coil in the peripheral artery, in order to localize drug distribution within the tumor. Drug administration was continued for four weeks with 50-100mg/m²/day of 5FU, 20mg/m²/week of CDGP and 15mg/m²/week of TXT. A total of 40Gy of irradiation, 2Gy each, was also given. There were 20 male and 22 female oral cancer patients in this study, totaling 42 cases (stage III: 21, stage IV: 21). The mean age was 68.2 ranging from 43 to 93 years old.
There were 39 complete response (CR) and 3 partial response (PR) cases. The response rate was 100%, the overall survival rate was 80.3% and the disease-specific survival rate was 84.6% according to the five-year survival rate by the Kaplan-Meier method. The disease-specific survival rate by stage was 95.2% for stage III and 71.7% for stage IV. The survival rate by region was 80.0% for the tongue (15 cases), 91.7% for the upper gingival and maxillary sinus (12 cases), 75.0% for the lower gingiva (8 cases), 80.0% for the buccal mucosa (5 cases), and 50.0% for the oral floor (2 cases). Although the adverse side effect of Grade 3 or higher mucositis was observed in all cases, hematological toxicity such as leukopenia appeared in only seven cases.
Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that this treatment is effective. It is suggested that this could be a surgery-free treatment for oral cancer.