Introduction: Cervical cancer is a major health problem worldwide. According to WHO this is the second most common cancer in women living in less developed regions. Patients with cervical cancer are often treated with chemotherapy, surgery or radiation therapy(RT) and some studies have shown that adjuvant radiotherapy is the salvage treatment. The cervical cancer has high prevalence and it is important to choose what treatment method, so the purpose of this systematic review is evaluating the effectiveness of adjuvant radiotherapy in cervical cancer.
Methods: Search was done by keywords in the databases; PubMed and Google Scholar databases, in the period of 2014 to 2019. In the first phase, 57 articles were retrieved from the PubMed database and 273 articles from the Google Scholar database that 307 articles removed by title review. Also 9 articles removed from the PubMed and 7 articles removed from the Google Scholar database by abstract review and finally 7 articles were included in this study.
Results: Seven articles were included, two of them shown that patient with cervical cancer treated by radiation therapy has the highest risk of developing vaginal fibrosis and mucosal atrophy was observed in 91% of the survivors and associated with sexual dysfunction.
Two studies have reported that salvage RT is safe and effective with mild side effects. In oligo metastatic cervical cancer result in excellent control and favorable outcome and suggested RT as a standard of therapy for cervical cancer. One of them shown that radiation therapy increases costs and has supportive care. The last one has reported that RT reducing the risk of death by 30-50%.
Conclusion: Our data found that RT is the cause of sexual dysfunctions and vaginal epithelium atrophy in some cases but as most studies reported that radiation therapy of cervical cancer has excellent effect and control tumor or region with minimal effect, it is an appropriate treatment method for cervical cancer but not the golden way of it.