Complete disappearance of multiple periorbital xanthelasmata after chemotherapy for primary extragonadal germ-cell mediastinal tumor.

laryngeal cancer treated with radiotherapy. They found that overexpression was significantly associated with radio-resistant tumors (P = 0.004) and suggested that cox-2 inhibitors might have a role in enhancing the effects of radiotherapy. Two important and recently published randomized trials clearly showed that in patients with operable high-risk head and neck cancer, concurrent use of radiotherapy and chemotherapy is superior to radiotherapy alone with regard to disease-free survival and/or overall survival [2, 3]. In these trials, in the concurrent arm, radiotherapy was combined with cisplatin, which is the most common and effective radiosensitizer of all chemotherapeutic agents. A recent study reported that the cox-2 inhibitor JTE-522–cisplatin combination elicited a synergistic and additive antitumor effect in different gastric cancer lines [4]. A study by Peng et al. [5] also demonstrated that the cox-2 inhibitor NS398 potently augmented chemotherapeutic drug-induced apoptosis in hypopharyngeal cancer. NS398 also radiosensitizes head and neck squamous cell carcinoma cell lines, possibly by inhibiting radiation-induced expression of cox-2 [6]. These preclinical and clinical data suggest that the cox-2 inhibitor–cisplatin combination may be more useful than cisplatin alone as a radiosensitizer in the treatment of head and neck cancer that overexpresses cox-2 protein.