February 16, 2023 – A brand new study suggests that older breast cancer patients can avoid weeks of strenuous radiation therapy after a lumpectomy.
The studypublished today in The New England Journal of Medicineshowed that girls aged 65 and over who were randomly chosen to forgo radiation had the identical 10-year survival rate as women who received the extra treatment. However, the ladies who didn't receive radiation were rather more more likely to have their cancer return and require further treatment.
“Radiotherapy can be a heavy burden for patients, especially the elderly. Our findings will help clinicians to help older patients decide whether this particular aspect of early breast cancer treatment can be omitted in a shared decision-making process that weighs all risks and benefits,” said lead study writer Ian Kunkler, Professor of Clinical Oncology on the University of Edinburgh, in a opinion.
Side effects of radiation are related to heart problems and secondary cancer. There are only a couple of studies on this in older breast cancer patients.
The Phase III trial involved 1,326 patients aged 65 and over with hormone-sensitive breast cancer that had not spread to other parts of the body, similar to the lymph nodes, and whose tumors were 3 centimeters or smaller. All of them had their tumors removed and took drugs which were shown to cut back the danger of reoccurrence in hormone-sensitive cancers.
Patients were assigned to receive either whole-breast irradiation or no irradiation in any respect.
The results showed that there are disadvantages to not receiving radiation. Local reoccurrence (i.e., breast cancer being found again in the identical breast) inside 10 years was significantly lower within the group that received the extra treatment – 0.9% of ladies who received radiation suffered a reoccurrence, in comparison with 9.5% of ladies who didn't receive radiation.
“Preventing local recurrence is an important consideration for many women,” said Dr. Naamit Kurshan Gerber, a radiation oncologist at NYU Langone’s Perlmutter Cancer Center. The Wall Street Journal“Do you want to do everything you can?”
However, survival rates at 10 years (81%) were similar in each groups, and the likelihood of the cancer developing into metastatic breast cancer, i.e. spreading to other parts of the body similar to bones, liver or lungs, was also similar.
“This is a really important confirmation that makes people say, 'Hey, we're going to be OK without radiation,'” breast cancer specialist Harold Burstein, MD, PhD of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told the diary“This enables clinicians to save more and more women’s lives.”