Journal
MATHEMATICAL MEDICINE AND BIOLOGY-A JOURNAL OF THE IMA
Volume 33, Issue 3, Pages 253-271Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS
DOI: 10.1093/imammb/dqv017
Keywords
low-grade gliomas; radiotherapy; mathematicalmodel of tumour response
Categories
Funding
- Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (Spain) [MTM2012-31073]
- FEDER
- Junta de Comunidades de Castilla-La Mancha [PEII-2014-031-P]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Grade II gliomas are slowly growing primary brain tumours that affect mostly young patients and become fatal after a variable time period. Current clinical handling includes surgery as first-line treatment. Cytotoxic therapies (radiotherapy RT or chemotherapy QT) are used initially only for patients having a bad prognosis. Therapies are administered following the 'maximum dose in minimum time' principle, which is the same schedule used for high-grade brain tumours. Using mathematical models describing the growth of these tumours in response to radiotherapy, we find that an extreme protraction therapeutical strategy, i.e. enlarging substantially the time interval between RT fractions, may lead to better tumour control. Explicit formulas are found providing the optimal spacing between doses in a very good agreement with the simulations of the full 3D mathematical model approximating the tumour spatiotemporal dynamics. This idea, although breaking the well-established paradigm, has biological meaning since, in these slowly growing tumours, it may be more favourable to treat the tumour as the tumour cells leave the quiescent compartment and move into the cell cycle.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available