番茄社区

A study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) Gastrointestinal Cancers Symposium showed that ablative radiation delivered to the celiac plexus decreased pain and opioid use among patients with pancreatic cancer and other tumors invading the celiac axis, and also improved health-related quality of life.

In this exclusive 番茄社区 video, Ryan Nipp, MD, of OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center in Oklahoma City, discusses the .

Following is a transcript of his remarks:

My name is Ryan Nipp, I work at the University of Oklahoma. I'm a medical oncologist. Today I have the honor of talking about an abstract that was presented this morning looking at celiac plexus radiosurgery to help with pain patients. A variety of cancers were involved in this study, the majority of which had pancreatic cancer, but any cancers that would affect and cause celiac plexus pain were included in this study.

So as part of this study, the investigators looked at 25 Gy of radiation to the area around the celiac plexus to try to help with pain. Their outcomes included the Brief Pain Inventory, quality of life, and then opioid equivalents as well. It appeared that they had about 90 patients that were enrolled and participated in the study and received the radiosurgery.

Of those patients, they were able to show an improvement in these patients' pain scores from baseline to week 3 and week 6. They also had better quality-of-life outcomes and decreased opioid requirements. So our takeaway was that this showed promising results for the effects of celiac plexus radiosurgery.

Some questions that came up in the discussion were around the idea of celiac plexus blockade with other mechanisms that we're more used to in clinic, and how does this add to what we know about celiac plexus blockade. And what of the future for this study, what are the future trials for this type of work, would a randomized trial be the next step? Is the dose of 25 Gy, is that the final answer here or could you even go for a little bit lower? What are some of the other side effects and toxicities, and how do we get this to our patients in clinic? What would be the next step so that we can do this for our patients?

The population that is highly in need, where you've got this area that's very sensitive to causing pain and for our patients to have this extra option of radiosurgery to help with their pain and pain control would be amazing. So we're looking forward to the next steps and this was a great first trial to show these results today.

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