Kypho-IORT: the first French treatment

Increasing incidence of malignant diseases and their therapies permit nowadays an increased life expectancy of cancer patient. Together with this, an increased incidence of distant metastases appears. Bone, and particularly vertebral metastases are one of the leading cause of reduced quality of life of these patients. A novel treatment approach for vertebral bone metastases combing intraoperative radiotherapy (IORT) and percutaneous kyphoplasty, i.e., Kypho-IORT, has been developed with a purpose of immediate pain relief, stabilization of the vertebra and sterilization of the disease within its body. This reduces subsequently the time of management of patients and allows a resumption of other therapies such as chemotherapy without interruption. In this paper we describe the first two cases of patients treated for symptomatic vertebral metastases by the technique Kypho-IORT using an Intrabeam® system that is available at our institution. These treatments did not form part of a clinical trial. In both cases, this treatment induced a quasi-immediate pain relief with an objective decrease of visual analogue scale (VAS) score post-operatively without any symptomatic treatment related complications. Respecting the indications of Kypho-IORT, this treatment procedure is a comfortable and feasible method of vertebra body metastasis management in painful patients.