Radiotherapy in the management of Kaposi's sarcoma in Nigeria

Although Kaposi's sarcoma is now known to be far more common in the black African than was originally thought, it is rare in Nigeria. Facilities for radiotherapy are not available in areas of Africa where this condition occurs frequently. Various chemotherapeutic agents have been used either singly or in combination, with different results. In the locally confined lesions, it is believed that radiotherapy has an edge over the use of cytotoxic drugs. Five patients were seen and treated with radiation at the Lagos University Teaching Hospital in five years. They were all males, adults and came from the southern part of the country. All had histological confirmation of their disease as well as full investigations. Their histories are briefly reported. Response to chemotherapy from the literature has been discussed in order to highlight similar peculiarities attending the use of radiation on the normal tissues of the limbs. Ten different dose--time relationships were used on the five patients and these were plotted on double log scale. The results show that good response to curative radiotherapy varies inversely with the duration of the disease.