The results of palliative intensive hypofractionated radiotherapy from patients having brain metastases with unknown primary tumour

OBJECTIVES We retrospectively examined the results of hypofractionated radiotherapy from 24 patients having brain metastases with unknown primary. METHODS Radiotherapy was administered to 24 patients (20 males (83.4%), 4 females (16.6%), age range 24-75 years) as 10 Gy fraction doses with 10 days intervals for a total of 30 Gy tumour dose in 3 fractions. Antiedema treatment was given to all patients. Karnofsky performance status was 70 for one patient and below 70 for the rest of the patients. Multiple metastases were present in 79.2% of the patients, in 20.8% of the patients there was single lesion and histophatologic diagnosis was present only for this group. 50% of the patients had hemiplegia, 45.8% had hemiparesia, 4.2 % had quadriplegia and 6 patients (25%) had other additional pathologies. Treatment was started at the day of admission for 13 patients. RESULTS The total and partial reliefs in neurological symptoms were seen in 8.3% and 37.5% of patients, respectively. Median survival from diagnosis of brain lesions was 2.87 months. The six months, 1 and 2 years survival rates were 33.3%, 8.33%, and 8.33%, respectively. The prognosis of patients with brain metastases is poor and have similar survival rates from the other poor performance patients (KPS<70). CONCLUSION As a conclusion, short course hypofractionated radiotherapy might be adviced to the patients with poor prognosis.