부산대학교 도서관

Simple Summary: Retinoblastoma is the most common ocular tumor among children. Typically, individuals with retinoblastoma are regularly monitored with diagnostic techniques and treated with many therapeutic approaches that use ionizing radiation. Thus, it is extremely important to clarify the effects of ionizing radiation on these patients, since they seem to be at a higher risk to develop other types of tumors compared to other cancer patients, especially when treated with radiation therapy. Many studies have been performed with the aim of elucidating the relationship between ionizing radiation exposure and the incidence of other malignant tumors. The results seem to show no significant correlation. Retinoblastoma (RB) is the most common ocular neoplasm in children, whose development depends on two mutational events that occur in both alleles of the retinoblastoma susceptibility gene (RB1). Regarding the nature of these mutational events, RB can be classified as hereditary if the first event is a germline mutation and the second one is a somatic mutation in retina cells or nonhereditary if both mutational events occur in somatic cells. Although the rate of survival of RB is significantly elevated, the incidence of second malignant neoplasms (SMNs) is a concern, since SMNs are the main cause of death in these patients. Effectively, RB patients present a higher risk of SMN incidence compared to other oncology patients. Furthermore, evidence confirms that hereditary RB survivors are at a higher risk for SMNs than nonhereditary RB survivors. Over the decades, some studies have been performed to better understand this subject, evaluating the risk of the development of SMNs in RB patients. Furthermore, this risk seems to increase with the use of ionizing radiation in some therapeutic approaches commonly used in the treatment of RB. This review aims to clarify the effect of ionizing radiation in RB patients and to understand the association between the risk of SMN incidence in patients that underwent radiation therapy, especially in hereditary RB individuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]