Predicting toxicity in radiotherapy for prostate cancer

This comprehensive review addresses most organs at risk involved in planning optimization for prostate cancer. It can be considered an update of a previous educational review that was published in 2009 (Fiorino et al., 2009).The literature was reviewed based on PubMed and MEDLINE database searches (from January 2009 up to September 2015), including papers in press; for each section/subsection, key title words were used and possibly combined with other more general key-words (such as radiotherapy, dose-volume effects, NTCP, DVH, and predictive model). Publications generally dealing with toxicity without any association with dose-volume effects or correlations with clinical risk factors were disregarded, being outside the aim of the review.A focus was on external beam radiotherapy, including post-prostatectomy, with conventional fractionation or moderate hypofractionation (<4 Gy/fraction); extreme hypofractionation is the topic of another paper in this special issue. Gastrointestinal and urinary toxicity are the most investigated endpoints, with quantitative data published in the last 5 years suggesting both a dose-response relationship and the existence of a number of clinical/patient related risk factors acting as dose-response modifiers. Some results on erectile dysfunction, bowel toxicity and hematological toxicity are also presented.