Breast Cancer Radiation Short Term Successful

An intense short term breast cancer radiation therapy just as effective. A three-week course found to be just as effective as the standard five-week regime for early-stage breast cancer women.

A professor of oncology of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine at McMaster University, Dr. Tim Whelan, headed a team of researchers to discover that women who accepted the accelerated therapy have a lower risk of the breast cancer for as long as 12 years after treatment.

Breast Cancer Radiation Short Term Successful

The study concluded that a more intense but shorter course of therapy is as safe and efficient as the standard treatment for chosen women who have undergone breast-conserving surgery.

Women who undergo a three-week treatment - called the accelerated hypofractionated whole-breast irradiation were found to have a low risk of side effects and recurrence of the cancer more than a decade after the treatment. This conclude that short term breast cancer radiation therapy is just as effective as the standard five-week course of radiation following surgery to remove the malignancy.

These study's results will change cancer treatment practice not just in Canada, but throughout North America and around the world, said Dr. Whelan .

Dr. Whelan, who is also a radiation oncologist at the Juravinski Cancer Centre at Hamilton Health Sciences, said "This is win-win: shorter intense treatment is better for the patient and less costly to provide."

A lot of women with early-stage breast cancer are able to undergo breast-conserving therapy to keep their breast after treatment. Generally, this implies that they first will have a lumpectomy to get rid of the cancer followed by a feed of radiation therapy to kill any unexpanded cancer cells.

Researchers randomly designated 1,234 women from Ontario and Quebec to be addressed with either accelerated radiation or standard radiation between April 1993 and September 1996, The participants were observed for 12 years to ascertain if the accelerated whole-breast radiation was as effective as the standard treatment.

After a decade of treatment, the breast cancer recurrence is 6.2 percent in patients treated with the accelerated radiation therapy, compared to 6.7 percent for patients treated with standard therapy. Both groups of patients also had a good or excellent cosmetic result from the radiation treatments.

Further research is now looking at even shorter more intensive therapy, said Whelan .

"We're now in the middle of further study on more intense radiation over an even shorter time, and we're seeing positive results."