Radiotherapy pilot trials with sensitizers of hypoxic cells: metronidazole in supratentorial glioblastomas

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Preliminary results of a two-arm randomized pilot study in glioblastoma patients were reported elsewhere last year (Urtasun et al., 1976). These results indicated that the group of patients receiving metronidazole four hours before irradiation of the brain had a significant delay in the time of tumour recurrence. The logical explanation was that in this group of patients the time of tumour regrowth was delayed due to a higher degree of inactivation of the radio-resistant hypoxic cell population (Urtasun et al., 1976).