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10 Jan 2006 01:02:26 pm

Shorter Radiation Therapy Technique In The Horizon

Anyone who has gone through that radiation therapy knows that more than anything it's the monotonous prolonged duration of treatment that causes fatigue and metal strain to breast cancer patients than anything else associated with this treatment.

A friend of mine was recently diagnosed with breast cancer. She had a small lump (about 1 inch in size) and had no lymph nodes involved. After lumpectomy she had this prolonged course of radiation therapy. She said that it was never ending and seemed to last forever. She was literally counting the days, and couldn't wait for those days to be over.

There is good news to suggest that radiation therapy may get a little easier for thousands of breast cancer patients in the near future. Researchers are now able to target the radiation beams just at the tumor site instead of the whole breast, cutting the usual six-week treatment down to five days.

The effectiveness of this type of radiation therapy has to be proven by controlled clinical trials. A major clinical trial is under way to prove the effectiveness of this new mode of radiation therapy and if it is effective, who's a good candidate and which of three five-day methods works best.

There is another way of giving radiation therapy and it is called brachytherapy. Some researchers from Canada are trying to develop a one-day treatment method by permanently implanting radiation seeds inside the breast to kill cancer cells. This brachytherapy treatment is also used in other cancers like prostate cancer.

This new technique is called partial-breast radiation and this is already fast gaining in popularity even before the effectiveness of this form of radiation therapy is proven by clinical trials. There is an ongoing National Cancer Institute-funded study to see if this form of radiation therapy works, and this study is recruiting patients since March.

Experts are warning women that, at this time there is no proof for the effectiveness of this type of radiation therapy and the say that women must carefully weigh the new options. If a woman is interested in this shorter course of radiation therapy, then the best course of action would be enrolment into a clinical trial.

Category : Breast cancer treatment | Posted By : Sherin |

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