Research on Making Breast Cancer Therapy Easier

If you know anyone undergoing treatment for breast cancer you and they will like the sound of this I think. Shorter, simpler treatments for breast cancer that are also more convenient for the patient and potentially less expensive for everyone. Sounds like a great deal!

Radiotherapy is a therapy given to women who are post-operative for breast cancer surgery to reduce the risk of the cancer returning. Generally 25 doses are given over a five week period. But what if the number of exposures to radiotherapy as well as the time period could be reduced?

Professor John Yarnold of The Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust and his team have been studying just that. They have been performing breast cancer treatment trials using short course radiotherapy. They’ve been experimenting with this for the past 10 years. As reported in the journal, Lancet Oncology (see link to abstract abstract HERE), their study compared the shorter and more concentrated dose of radiotherapy with the standard treatment on 1410 women. After monitoring the health of the participants for a ten year period, Yarnold and team found that the shorter course was as good as the standard extended treatments.

Dr. Yarnold and his researchers are awaiting the results of other trials in order to confirm that the proposed shorter course is more effective in the long run. If these results are confirmed there is a real opportunity here for less hospital visits and better outcomes for patients. Good news indeed.

(source information for this post came from the 5/31/06 edition of the Wall Street Journal)

(Photo courtesy of Gretchen’s Photos, used under Creative Commons license)