ABSTRACT
A non-fatal accident with a CGR-Sagittaire accelerator in the Dr Daniel den Hoed Cancer Center (DDHCC) in Rotterdam in 1988 is described. In a period with frequently occurring technical problems, a patient, undergoing fractionated treatment at this accelerator for prostatic cancer, developed severe skin reactions on the right half ventral part of thorax, head and upper arm. The skin reactions suggested an irradiation with a dose of up to 10-20 Gy, so it was likely that a radiation accident had occurred caused by leakage radiation. A number of experiments were performed in attempting to explain the estimated large dose rates of leakage radiation. Under rather extreme malfunctioning conditions, a high leakage dose rate (4 Gy/min) could be obtained during therapy use. This condition might have occurred during this period of technical difficulty.
Subject(s)
Accidents , Equipment Failure , Particle Accelerators , Prostatic Neoplasms/radiotherapy , Radiodermatitis/etiology , Humans , MaleABSTRACT
Four patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) were treated with high-dose cyclophosphamide and total body irradiation followed by reinfusion of a portion of their own bone marrow collected during remission. This procedure was applied when the patients were in complete remission. They did not receive further maintenance chemotherapy after grafting. The use of bone marrow for grafting that had been pre-exposed to high-dose chemotherapy for remission induction did not preclude good hematologic regeneration. All patients showed stable remissions that lasted for 64+, 21, 40+, and 19+ months, respectively. Death in the second patient was due to a medullary relapse of the leukemia. Autologous bone marrow transplantation in patients with AML in remission may permit lasting remissions, even when applied without additional chemotherapy and attempts to purify the marrow of neoplastic cells.
