Safety and efficacy of radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy for recurrent metastatic renal pelvic and ureteral carcinoma

Purpose To retrospectively investigate the safety and efficacy of radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy for recurrent metastatic renal pelvic and ureteral carcinoma. Methods 109 patients were enrolled in this study, including 44 patients in the radiochemotherapy group and 65 patients in the chemotherapy group. Propensity score matching (PSM) was used to balance the baseline characteristics of the two groups by 1:1 matching. Kaplan–Meier method was used to calculate PFS and OS. Cox regression model was used for multivariate analysis. The side effects were evaluated by CTCAE v5.0 Results The median follow-up time was 14.5 months. Multivariate analysis showed that radiotherapy was a good independent prognostic factor for OS (HR: 0.327, 95% CI 0.157–0.680, P = 0.003). After matching, there were 40 patients in both groups, and the median PFS and OS in the radiochemotherapy group were longer than those in the chemotherapy group (PFS: 10.4 vs. 6.7 months, P = 0.035; OS: 43.5 vs. 18.8 months, P < 0.001). In addition, in the radiochemotherapy group, patients treated with radiotherapy before first-line chemotherapy failure had a longer PFS than those treated with radiotherapy after chemotherapy failure (median PFS: 15.7 vs. 6 months, P = 0.003). There was no significant difference in the incidence of grade 3–4 toxicities between the two groups (52.3% vs. 50.8%, P = 0.878). Conclusion For patients with recurrent metastatic renal pelvic and ureteral carcinoma, radiotherapy combined with chemotherapy is well tolerable and expected to bring long-term survival benefits, and the benefits of early interventional radiotherapy may be more obvious.