2006/08/29 by P. Castorina, Castorina, P., T. S. Deisboeck +7
Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Cancer Risks and Factors #Childhood Cancer Survivors' Quality of Life #FOS: Physical sciences #Medical Physics (physics.med-ph) #physics.med-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.physics/0608278
12 pages, 8 figures
arxiv created 2006/08/29 · openalex publication_date 2006/08/29 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Comparing both, the more conventional Gompertz tumor growth law (GL) and the ``Universal'' law (UL), recently proposed and applied to cancer,we have investigated the growth law's implications on various radiotherapy regimen. According to GL, the surviving tumor cell fraction could be reduced 'ad libidum', independently of the initial tumor mass,simply by increasing the number of treatments. On the contrary, if tumor growth dynamics would indeed follow the Universal scaling law, there is a lower limit of the survival fraction that cannot be reduced any further regardless of the total number of treatments. This finding can explain the so called ``tumor size effect'' and re-emphasizes the importance of early diagnosis as it implies that radiotherapy may be successful provided the tumor mass at treatment onset is rather small. Taken together with our previous works, implications of these findings include revisiting standard radiotherapy regimen and overall treatment protocols.