Clinical Study Cytokines, Fatigue, and Cutaneous Erythema in Early Stage Breast Cancer Patients Receiving Adjuvant Radiation Therapy

Copyright © 2014 Vitaliana De Sanctis et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. We investigated the hypothesis that patients developing high-grade erythema of the breast skin during radiation treatment could bemore likely to present increased levels of proinflammatory cytokines whichmay lead, in turn, to associated fatigue. Forty women with early stage breast cancer who received adjuvant radiotherapy were enrolled from 2007 to 2010. Fatigue symptoms, erythema, and cytokine levels (IL-