Radiotherapy ups survival rate after breast cancer: study

Radiotherapy ups survival rate after breast cancer: study

LONDON: Breast cancer patients could lower the risk of recurrence if they have radiation therapy after lumpectomy (surgical removal of a cancerous tumor), a team of doctors said yesterday.

Usually, there is a 26 percent risk of recurrence within five years of a lumpectomy. Radiotherapy reduces this risk to 7 percent. Likewise, radiotherapy also reduced the risk of dying from cancer 15 years after it had been diagnosed, from 36 percent to 31 percent. The findings were announced by a team from the University of Oxford, England.

The team analyzed the medical records and progress of over 42,000 breast cancer patients worldwide.

Although radiotherapy is considered standard treatment for cancer patients, many women still refuse to go in for it fearing side effects. Their fears are not altogether unjustified. Many patients have reported swelling in the armpit, sometimes the whole shoulder is damaged and sometimes the cancer develops in the other breast or in the lung.

Most patients were not sure whether or not the reduced risk of recurrence also meant a greater chance of survival.

The Oxford University team said the results would help patients and doctors choose the most appropriate treatment on the basis of a more realistic evaluation of radiotherapy.

The study also found that patients who had to undergo mastectomy (removal of affected breast) and in whom the cancer had spread to the armpit, radiotherapy caused more side effects than benefits. The researchers said it was clearly unsuitable for such patients.

The report was published in the Lancet medical journal. Dr Richard Peto co-author of the report, said that the study provided the first real definite evidence of the relative effectiveness of radiation therapy. The improvement from radiotherapy alone may be small but when combined with hormone therapy and chemotherapy it would add up to a greater chance of survival.

Breast cancer ranks as the second-leading killer after lung cancer, killing more than 40,000 women each year in the US alone. The France-based International Agency for Research on Cancer warns that worldwide more than a million women are diagnosed with breast cancer every year.