Radiation therapy can cause severe late complications, including postirradiation fibrosis leading to coronary artery occlusion and myocardial infarction.
Alerts clinicians to late CAD risk in Hodgkin survivors after radiation; leaves open prospective studies on surveillance and prevention.
COMPLICATIONS of radiation therapy, which are more severe and disabling than the primary disease, may develop in patients with Hodgkin's disease. The major disability in a patient who survived for 18 years after diagnosis was due to an extreme degree of postirradiation fibrosis, resulting in elephantiasis of the legs, and coronary artery occlusion and acute myocardial infarction secondary to radiation-induced coronary artery fibrosis. To our knowledge, this latter complication of radiation therapy has not been previously described in detail, only two cases having been briefly discussed by Pearson.¹ Report of a Case A diagnosis of Hodgkin's disease was made in this patient at the age of 23 (1943) by biopsy of enlarged right inguinal lymph nodes. Over the next three years, he received radiation therapy to the axillary, cervical, inguinal, and abdominal areas. Elephantiasis and chronic cellulitis of the legs and scrotum developed, which was not improved after a
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Malin R. Dollinger (1966) studied this question.
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