Pneumonitis After Radiotherapy for Lung Cancer

Plain-language summary

Major goals of radiotherapy include local disease control and improvement of the patients' prognoses. One possible side effect of radiotherapy for lung cancer is radiation pneumonitis. Severe (grade ≥3) radiation pneumonitis can even be fatal in approximately 2% of the patients. It would be important to identify patients developing radiation pneumonitis and requiring medical treatment early. In the present study, the patients are asked to complete a questionnaire (paper version) once a week during the period of radiotherapy and up to 24 weeks following radiotherapy. In this questionnaire, the patients are asked to state and rate their symptoms potentially associated with pneumonitis. Scoring points are assigned to the severity of the symptoms (symptom scores), and the resulting sum score (patient score) will be used for identification of radiation pneumonitis. The main goal of this trial is to evaluate the usefulness of a new symptom-based scoring system with respect to the identification of patients developing pneumonitis after radiotherapy of breast or lung cancer. The discriminative power of the symptom-based scoring system will be assessed by calculating the area under the ROC curve (AUC). Taking into account that 5% of patients will not qualify for Full Analysis Set, a total of 78 patients should be recruited. If statistical significance of the AUC is reached, the most-informative (optimal) scoring point to identify radiation pneumonitis will be derived. Sensitivity analyses will be conducted to further investigate the performance of the symptom-based scoring system. In 10 patients, the paper version of the symptom-based scoring system (questionnaire) will be supplemented by a mobile application (app) asking the same questions regarding symptoms potentially associated with radiation pneumonitis.

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