Long-term clinical outcomes of postoperative pelvic radiotherapy with or without prophylactic paraaortic irradiation for stage I-II cervical carcinoma with positive lymph nodes: retrospective analysis of predictive variables regarding survival and failure patterns.

We performed retrospective analysis to classify the risk hazard of patients with stage I-II cervical cancer with lymph node metastases treated with postoperative radiotherapy. From 1981 to 1995, 106 patients with early stage cervical carcinoma who received adjuvant pelvic radiation were entered in the analysis. The median patient age was 53.0 years (range 21-73). The median dose of 45.3 Gy (range, 32.1-56.4 Gy) was delivered over the whole pelvis. Seventy patients also received prophylactic paraaortic radiation (median 44 Gy; range 22-46 Gy). The 5/10-year overall survival (OAS), disease-free survival (DFS), pelvic control, and distant metastasis-free survival rates were 69.1/63.5%, 62.4/58.1%, 85.7/84.3%, and 74.1/71.6%, respectively. In the uni-/multivariate analyses, the significant prognostic factors of OAS and DFS proved to be disease stage, duration period between operation and radiotherapy, histology, and presence or absence of common iliac lymph node metastasis. Using the results of these analyses, we devised a predictive model for DFS. In this model, the 5-year DFS rates of patients with low (N = 35), intermediate (N = 59), and high-risk factors (N = 12) were 88.1%, 56.7%, and 16.7%, respectively (p < 0.0001). The majority of analyzed patients did not have adequate DFS estimates in this series. High-risk patients should receive a more intensive strategy, such as concurrent chemoradiotherapy. On the other hand, the effort to reduce toxicity should be considered carefully.