Purpose: To investigate the efficacy of chemoradiotherapy combined with bevacizumab in patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma and its clinical value in the cognitive function and radiation-induced brain injury.
Methods: A total of 80 patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma treated in our hospital from March 2013 to October 2015 were selected and randomly divided into the control group (n=40) and the observation group (n=40). Patients in the control group were treated with three-dimensional conformal radiotherapy and regular chemotherapy, while patients in the observation group were treated with bevacizumab. Progression-free survival (PFS) and median survival (MS), the therapeutic effect, the levels of vascular endothelium-related indexes, S-100B protein and neuron-specific enolase (NSE), the changes in subjective evaluation criteria for cognitive function, the changes in auditory event-related potential P300 amplitude and latency, and the changes in neurological score during treatments were compared.
Results: In the observation group, both PFS and MS were longer than those in the control group (p<0.05); meanwhile, the overall effective rate of treatment was significantly higher (p<0.05). In addition, S-100B protein and NSE levels in the observation group 6 months after treatments were obviously lower than those in control group. At 3 and 6 months after treatments, the cognitive function score in the observation group was obviously higher compared to the control group. The auditory event-related potential P300 amplitude in observation group was lower than that in control group, while the latency was longer compared to the control group. At 3 and 6 months after treatments, the neurological score in observation group was remarkably higher than that in control group (p<0.05).
Conclusions: The combined application of bevacizumab for patients with nasopharyngeal carcinoma after chemoradiotherapy can significantly prolong the survival time of patients, improve the clinical therapeutic effect and the cognitive function of patients, and reduce the incidence rate of radiation-induced brain injury.