[Value and importance of intracavitary therapy in cervix carcinoma]

The guiding topic of this report was "the value and importance of intracavitary therapy in uterine cervix carcinoma". This implies first of all the task to assess the importance of contact therapy within the scope of all therapeutic measures taken in case of uterine cervix carcinoma. Furthermore it was necessary to compare the importance of the different methods of contact therapy: conventional radium therapy as well as low dose rate and high dose rate afterloading techniques. As to surgical intervention, it is clear that only favorable stages can be taken into consideration for this treatment. It is shown by means of data taken from the Annual Report, Vol. 18, that a considerable number of patients with uterine cervix carcinoma I are irradiated even in hospitals whose field of activity lies preponderantly in surgery, and that by far most of the patients cured from uterine cervix cancer owe their recovery to contact therapy. The consideration of contact therapy methods shows clearly that radium should no longer be used in clinical practice. Psychological doubts often hinder the decision if long-term or short-term afterloading therapy is to be applied. It is therefore shown that the very different forms of radium therapy with their chronological and spatial dose distribution were due to the characteristics of radium (e.g. little specific activity) or to other compelling features and that they were not based on radiobiological aspects. The radium dose values obtained by empirical research and the resulting spatial and chronological dose distribution are therefore not imperative. So it is not inevitable to choose the low dose rate afterloading method. On the contrary, the high dose rate technique with an adequate fractionation is very probably the method of choice. To sum up it can be said that contact therapy is still the most important therapeutic method in uterine cervix cancer.