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. 1996 Jun;73(12):1455–1462. doi: 10.1038/bjc.1996.276

Randomised multicentre trials of CHART vs conventional radiotherapy in head and neck and non-small-cell lung cancer: an interim report. CHART Steering Committee.

M I Saunders 1, S Dische 1, A Barrett 1, M K Parmar 1, A Harvey 1, D Gibson 1
PMCID: PMC2074536  PMID: 8664112

Abstract

While radiotherapy is proceeding, tumour cells may proliferate. The use of small individual doses reduces late morbidity. Continuous hyperfractionated accelerated radiation therapy (CHART), which reduces overall treatment from 6-7 weeks to 12 days and gives 36 small fractions, has now been tested in multicentre randomised controlled clinical trials. The trial in non-small-cell lung cancer included 563 patients and showed improvement in survival; 30% of the CHART patients were alive at 2 years compared with 20% in the control group (P = 0.006). In the 918 head and neck cases, there was only a small, non-significant improvement in the disease-free interval. In this interim analysis there was a trend for those with more advanced disease (T3 and T4) to show advantage; this will be subject to further analysis when the data are more mature. The early mucosal reactions appeared sooner and were more troublesome with CHART, however they quickly settled; so far no difference in long-term morbidity has emerged. These results support the hypothesis that tumour cell repopulation can occur during a conventional course of radiotherapy and be a cause of treatment failure.

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Selected References

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