A comparative study of intratumoral chemotherapy in advanced childhood common solid tumors

Advanced and inoperable solid tumors in children are great killer despite aggressive multimodality treatment. Intravenous chemotherapy, due to high dose of drug given systemically, at times leads to abandonment of therapy due to systemic toxicities. To overcome this problem lots of studies are going on to explore alternative modes of giving anticancer drugs so as to decrease the systemic toxicities of the drugs and increase their therapeutic index at the same time.

The study was conducted to know the results of anterior intratumoral chemotherapy and its comparison to anterior intravenous chemotherapy.

Forty patients of advanced inoperable solid tumors in children (Wilms' tumor and neuroblastoma) between 2000-2004 were randomly allocated to two groups. Group A (20 patients) was given intratumoral chemotherapy while Group B (20 patients) was given intravenous chemotherapy. Both the groups were compared in terms of reduction in size and volume, resectability of tumor, histopathological changes and side-effects of chemotherapeutic drugs. The Institute's ethics committee approved this study.

Males were predominant in both type of cases (Wilms' tumor and neuroblastoma) in both the groups (Group A and Group B). Mean age in the study was 3.27 years. All cases in Group A had Stage III disease except three cases which had Stage IV disease (one case of Wilms' tumor and two cases of neuroblastoma) while in Group B only two cases had Stage IV disease (one case of Wilms' tumor and one case of neuroblastoma). Intratumoral chemotherapy was found to be superior over intravenous chemotherapy in terms of reduction of size and volume (63% in Group A vs. 22% in Group B). The resectability was 70% in the intratumoral group in comparison to 40% in the intravenous group. The overall good histopathological response was 71% in Group A as opposed to 0% in Group B. Moreover, the incidence and severity of side-effects of chemotherapy and morbidity was less in intratumoral chemotherapy. Mortality was also low in Group A (5%) in comparison to Group B (20%).

In this study intratumoral chemotherapy was found to be superior over intravenous chemotherapy in terms of better and early tumor regression, minimal side-effects, better tumor resectability and well response on histopathological criteria. This study is still going on at our center where different drug combinations, different drug doses, their toxicities, their mechanisms of action, their serum levels and long-term results of intratumoral mode of chemotherapy are to be evaluated thoroughly in future.