There is often concern that postoperative radiotherapy will damage the nerve graft. This is not the case. Radiotherapy may delay the nerve regeneration but it doesn't prevent it from ultimately happening. A typical course of postoperative radiotherapy will take about 6-7 weeks to deliver. The use of chemotherapy and radiotherapy together in this setting must be regarded as experimental as there is no data as to whether the increased side effects will be compensated by any improvement in control or survival.
Radiotherapy works best when the number of residual tumor cells is small.
This is considerably less than expected with surgery and adjuvant radiotherapy.