From the NY Times health section:
Shorter Radiation for Cancer of the Breast – NYTimes.com
Three weeks of radiation treatment work just as well as the usual course of five weeks or more for women with early-stage breast cancers, Canadian researchers have reported, after monitoring a large group of patients for 12 years.
The results, presented Monday at a conference in Boston, provide some of the strongest evidence yet that radiation schedules can safely be shortened to make life easier for patients and to let clinics reduce their waiting lists and treat more women without buying more machines.
>>>>>>
But Dr. Zietman cautioned that the results applied only to women with early cancers like those in the study, which were removed by lumpectomy and had not spread to the lymph nodes. Often, women with such early cancers do not need chemotherapy.
Other major changes in radiation are also in the works. Doctors are experimenting with ways to treat just part of the breast rather than all of it, and to make the treatment safer, they are trying to avoid exposing the heart and lungs to radiation.
>>>>>>
Dr. Park, who is studying partial breast irradiation, said: “We’re learning who we can treat appropriately with these more limited treatments. We may not know exactly right now, but people should watch. In the next 10 years, we’ll really change the number of things we can offer for breast cancer.”
Leave a Reply