Radiotherapy reducing local failure rates and improving overall survival has a favorable impact on the primary treatment of rectal cancer. However, radiation as an adjuvant therapy for that purpose and other pelvic malignances has been shown to increase long-term morbidity causing severe rectal or vesical mucositis, sometimes stenosis, undistensibler rectum with reduced capacity and/or anorectal dysfunction due lombosacralneuropathy with physiologic changes whose interaction remains poorly understood 60,63. Those iatrogenic outcomes stress the need for finding predictive factors for local recurrence to exclude patients with very high probability for cure with surgery alone and to use optimized radiation techniques22,64.
Pelvic radiotherapy; radiation injury; inflammatory diseases; functional disturbances