Anticoagulation for Radiation-Induced Optic Neuropathy

Abstract

Radiation-induced optic neuropathy (RION) is a severely disabling complication of radiotherapy, without any known effective treatment. Three patients, one female and two males, aged 60, 34, and 45 years, respectively, developed progressive deterioration in visual acuity over 1 month, 8 years, and 2 months, starting 3, 12, and 9 years after radiotherapy for nasopharyngeal carcinoma. They received 70.15, 60.89, and 56.11 Gy over a period of 6–7 weeks, with fractionated doses of 2, 1.79, and 1.81 Gy, respectively. Ophthalmological examination revealed a relative afferent pupillary defect in the latter 2 patients, best-corrected visual acuity was 6/12 or better in all. Visual field charting showed a superior altitudinal field defect in the first two, and generalised visual loss in the third patient in the symptomatic eyes. Anticoagulation with heparin bridging and oral warfarin with an INR target of 2.0–3.0 was commenced within 2 months of symptom onset. All showed improvement in visual fields within 2 weeks, and remained stable for at least 2 years while on warfarin. Our encouraging findings will need to be confirmed in a randomised controlled clinical trial.

Keywords

• radiation
• optic neuropathy
• anticoagulation
• warfarin
• heparin
• nasopharyngeal carcinoma