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BREAST CANCER PATIENTS who receive radiotherapy targeted specifically at the site of their tumour experience fewer side effects, according to a new study published today in the Lancet.
Researchers hailed the results as a “major step forward” and said their results “have the potential to lead to a real change in the way selected breast cancer patients are treated”.
Most women with breast cancer would usually receive radiation therapy to the full breast, but it can cause side effects such as hair loss, fatigue, aches and soreness. This study, however, suggested that better outcomes may come from focusing in on the area with the tumour.
Five years after treatment finished, the women on the clinical trial had fewer debilitating side effects of treatment than women who received treatment to the whole breast.
The trial involved more than 2,000 women aged 50 or over in the UK with early stage breast cancer, that was at low risk of coming back.
The women who received the partial radiation therapy reported fewer long-term changes to the appearance and feel of their breast, than those who had received treatment to the full breast.
Dr Charlotte Coles, reader in breast radiation oncology at Cambridge University, and lead investigator on the trial, said: “We started this trial because there was evidence that if someone’s cancer returns, it tends to do so close to the site of the original tumour, suggesting that some women receive unnecessary radiation to the whole breast.
Now we have evidence to support the use of less, but equally effective, radiotherapy for selected patients.
Hilary Stobart was a participant on the trial. The 62-year-old was diagnosed in 2009, and was part of the group that received the partial radiotherapy.
She said: “Any cancer diagnosis is shocking. There’s such a lot to take in and it takes time to process.
I was in the group that had the least amount of radiotherapy. I had very few side effects – just soreness at the start but that was it. I am pleased that I was part of this study.
After presenting the results to colleagues, this method has been chosen to be considered for selected patients by the UK Royal College of Radiologists 2016 breast radiotherapy consensus and the Danish Breast Cancer Apology Group.
Professor Arnie Purushotham, senior clinical adviser at Cancer Research UK, added: “This approach could spare many women significant physical discomfort and emotional distress.”
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Brilliant news,anything that alleviates pain and suffering is to be welcomed
I am 13 months clear , after 6 months of chemo and 1 month of everyday day Radium treatment , the only thing now is the overwhelming fatigue left from the above . You can do or plan nothing , I’m shattered tired from one end of the day to the other . Doctors and gps have no answers , and from speaking with others that have had Radium etc , it seem the norm . Recovering from radium seems to be , how long is a piece of string . Yes I’m most grateful to be this side of my journey , but its far from over . To anyone starting this journey , DON’T FEAR IT , take each day as it comes . But know it is a long road. Best of luck and Never give up.
@Declan Mc Guirk: Declan I hear you.
I believed , per-diagnosis, in the myth that if you eat healthy and exercise you won’t get cancer, in fact it just lowers your odds, it’s as much genetic lottery as anything else.
I ate (and do again) fruit salads and wholegrain toast for breakfast, hit the gym at 7am each morning, avoided all processed foods, rarely ate confectionary products, so I had bundles of energy. Then came the treatment and suddenly BOOM. I remember the moment it first hit me, I figured because I still was very ripped and still ate the same, I must be as fit and full of energy. Then one day not long after starting treatment I tried to bolt up the steps of the DART station to catch a train pulling into the station. I got to the top and literally dropped to the ground gasping for breath with this fizzy feeling in my head and my vision blurry. I suddenly had the energy levels of an 85 year old.
It’s not just radium loads of even the hi tech drugs have side effects, and they can be unbearable. Insomnia, loss of appetite, loss of energy. It will go away. It takes your body nearly 2 years to fully rebuild itself. But it will happen. Make sure you eat plenty of carbohydrates (as opposed to ”carbs), plenty of veg with dinner, eat some fruit with breakfast in the morning, eat it rather than drink it as that gives you slow release energy. Whole grain or wholemeal bread does the same (if you’re used to that plastic white stuff, try to switch after a few weeks you won’t ever wanna go back it has far more taste and gives you more energy). Obviously don’t eat too many carbohydrates as you wont burn them off and it will just lead to weight which = more energy loss but have them with every meal.
Great news
Hair loss is not a side effect of radiotherapy to the breast!
@Barney Corleone: Nope. People tend to confuse radiation and chemo, and because they’re taken together in some cases that’s one of the ways such confusion occurs.
Radiation to shrink a tumor to the breast might be ordered to make the tumor small enough that it can be removed and still allow sparing the breast. So if that patient gets Adjuvant chemo soon after surgery and has hair loss people might say “oh the radiations made her loose her hair”.
@Ryan Carroll: Do you mind me asking how you are doing these days Ryan ??? im not being nosey but I have wondered about you. I hope you are well.
Already happening in Ireland.
Ong can only imagine that in a couple of hundred years, getting cancer will be as bad as getting the flu. Go humans!
Eh, the only problem with this is that radiation itself causes cancer because it damages the oxygen receptors of the cells and the DNA triggering mutation. Make no mistake, the reason for this move is cost cutting because of the high cost of oncology drugs. Radiation treatment is much cheaper. Don’t worry though, I’m sure they’ll make up some dud statistics or manipulate the “definitions” to show “better outcomes”.
@Ian Oh: Very helpful comment for women battling breast cancer. Thanks for that. Are you off to punch a kitten now ??
@Ian Oh: This is like people who bad mouth chemotherapy. Yes, there is a risk of side effects but it’s a simple question of risk/benefit analysis. I think having cancer and not treating it aggressiveley is worse than the <5% chance your radiotherapy will cause a secondary cancer. How crazy am I to believe such a thing…
@Ian Oh: so let me make sure I understand you. 50 years ago breast cancer treatment involved radical mastectomy (a horrible operation removing breast, chest wall muscles and all lymph nodes) wide field radiotherapy (again horrible) and unrefined chemo. Now in most cases it’s down to just having the lump out, and very targeted chemo with much less side effects. Now we have a paper saying we can reduce the radio therapy dose even more to get even less side effects. And the best you can come up with is radiotherapy is bad and it’s all a conspiracy? Why is it then that off all cancers we get as humans, that breast cancer survival rates are now almost 80%?
@Catherine Sims: Up to 10% of invasive cancers are related to radiation exposure and the severity of the cancer is independent of the dose, so what can I say? You don’t like me highlighting an inconvenient truth. You only want truths that give you that warm fuzzy feeling and the belief that everything in cancer treatment is just great. Unfortunately I live in the real world where the war on cancer was declared in 1971, billions have been spent and outcomes have improved little. In fact cancer death rates since 1971 have gotten significantly worse http://www.gilbertling.org/lp2.htm Only when we confront these truths and make a fuss about them will improvements come, I believe.
@John B: (1) 90% of breast tumours removed today are non-malignant meaning they are not cancerous and would never kill you. Even though we call it breast cancer, by definition they are not cancerous. https://www.cancer.org/cancer/breast-cancer/non-cancerous-breast-conditions/phyllodes-tumors-of-the-breast.html (2) Cancer “cure” rates are measured in 5 year survival today. If you live 5 years after diagnosis, you are “cured” in the prediction statistics irrespective of how soon you die afterwards.
@Ian Oh: Don’t waste your time mate, trying to be rational with quacks, is, in my experience, futile.
No amount of argument or evidence will sway them. If you show them peer reviewed studies that all agree with each other, they’ll just widen the conspiracy and say they were all rigged by big pharma owned doctors.
Most of them don’t understand even the difference betwen adjuntive chemotheraphy and chemo as a primary treatment, or fall for easy lies like the infamous “2% gambit”. We could exaust ourselves giving him stats for the next 3 hours he’d just cry conspiracy and say they’re all fake.
Conspiracy theory mindset starts out with conclusion first and bends evidence around it, you can’t use logic.
What it comes down to is this: do you trust the entire worlds scienteists and near universal agreement of the entire global medical profession or quacks online 95% of whom are not even medical doctors let alone oncology experts. Trust the doctors, I’ve seen too many cases of people dying because they choose quackery instead of real medicine.
@Ian Oh: You know people don’t just see a growth on imaging and remove it, yeah? Biopsy, mate. It’s a thing. Also, after 5 years in the case of some cancers you are cured. So, that’s wrong. I’m sure John B knows the rest about 5 year survival rates being a good marker and why. I don’t know enough about it to comment on that aspect.
Why would they use radiation or chemo on a tumor that’s not malignant or cancerous?
They can tell on the imaging by a number of factors like the smoothness of the surface and edges if it’s benign or not, they don’t just go full on nuclear and blast every anomaly on a scan with radiation and chemo. As titus says a needle biopsy is easily done with many cancers.
He does not seem to understand the 5 year survival rate, see what I mean? I’m always amazed at people who have these really firm impossible to change positions on topics where their basic knowledge is so poor, the reason I comment on so few stories here is because I don’t like talking about an area unless I know my stuff.
5 year survival rate, oversimplified, means if you’ve made it the 5 years you are probably going to be ok, because if, for example they took a kidney with renal cell carcinoma out at say, stage 2b and didn’t think it had spread, there is always the chance of some micrometastisis where a few stray cells have gotten outside the kidney, if they were going to multiply and create new tumors they’d probably do it within 5 years, even slow growing cancers would show up by that stage, that’s why it’s a good marker.
@Ryan Carroll: So all these scientists are wrong too Ryan .. lol ..
It is mostly all about the money . From the oncologist who gave 500 people plus treatments JUST FOR THE Money,that had no cancers, to as its know Big Pharma..
I’m not going to preach at you whats right or wrong , do you own research and follow which ever path you wish .. As i did .. Good luck .
@Ian Oh: breast lumps that are removed and benign are not called cancer and do not receive chemo or radio. You example of phyllodes tumour clearly confirms your absolute ignorance of the topic as it is an exceptionally rare tumour that doesn’t affect the numbers. As for 5 years survival: the timelines are based on recurrence. For breast cancer, recurrence is rare after 5 years of being disease free hence it is practical for breast cancer.
As for side effects: all treatments have side effects. That’s it is a balance. However most types of cancer are fatal without treatment so side effects are acceptable to most.
People like you really need to live in the jungle where nature will take its course.
Breaking News from Declan McGuirk: Evolution… is real.
Which is basically the point of what these scientists are saying. That cells resistant to a drug will survive and propagate. It doesn’t say chemo doesn’t work (and it works especially well in childhood cancers ie. before chemo: 10% survival, after chemo advent – 80% survival).
And as an FYI, what you’ve said only applies to high dose chemo. There is also low dose metronomic chemo which does not do any of the things in that article and that’s the point of it…
Declan sigh…jesus…..I knew someone would trot out a bogus or misunderstood study eventually…
1. that study is now infamous in it’s short existence for being colossally misunderstood by the press
2. It’s one study. One study tells us nothing. Studies need to be repeatable or reproducible
3. Cancer cells spreading is not the same as cancer spreading and creating new tumors.
4. Any science story in the mail, telegraph or Huffington Post can be safely assumed to be massively misinterpreted or misunderstood (in this case), or outright bogus.
5. .I could give you a detailed post explaining why that study does not actually say what you think it says (a headline or news story and the study are rarely the same thing), but it would not change your mind, so I’d be wasting my time.
6. That study focused on one very specific type of treatment in one specific type of cancer.
It’s not about “following your own path” , it’s about finding the facts, facts are not choice based, they’re reality based, independent of what we WANT to be true. These treatments are the only available options because they work not because they make pharma companies money. Just because something makes a business money does not make it evil, the computer you used to post this made apple or dell or some other company money, that’s not inherently a bad thing by definition.
An oncologist in our system or the NHS or Medicare Canada that prescribes chemo or radiation does not gain any money from doing that, he gets paid the exact same amount of money regardless. Every researcher on the planet is not paid by pharma companies, many work for government institutions that are public funded. Even if pharma started dolling out bogus research it would be caught in 10 seconds, that’s the entire point of peer review, that’s what peer review IS, people who know looking at a study to see if it’s credible, and if it’s not those oncologists who do not work for the company that did the research or helped fund the research have no incentive whatsoever to participate in their BS research, and their competitors have an active reason to blow the whistle on them (pharma is not one big monolith but competing companies)
On side effects, all medicine and pharmacology is about balance, if I have cancer and they give me Oxicontin for the pain it’s going to have side effects. What I have to decide is, is the chance of constipation (not likley unless I take a lot) or drowsiness (likley) worth relief of the pain? It’s a simple cost benefit analysis. Cancer treatments are at present harsh (and getting less so) but they save your life, short term side effects v death, most people go with the side effects.
@Ian Oh: rubbish. Radiotherapy, stereotactic radiosurgery, beam shaping etc are under constant development and research. It’s no surprise that these therapies arise from time to time and if anything – vested interests might try to suppress cheaper modalities that aren’t as profitable
That great news for our fairer sex i wonder will we get the same outcome for the prostate cancer
@James Moore: You know that survival rates for prostate cancer are nearly 100%, right?
@James Moore: Also, the side effects of prostate cancer, as it’s usually a very treatable form of cancer, are not the same as with breast cancer.
There have been plenty of advances in prostate cancer treatment.
@Veronica: he is probably referring to metastatic prostate cancer. You are correct that most men with prostate cancer are very elderly and usually don’t live long enough to die from their prostate cancer. Unfortunately there is a group of younger patients who more likely get metastatic disease and their 5 year survival is only 30% :(
@John B: Yes and testicular cancer can be problematic too but cancer isn’t about competition. All cancers have their own researchers. It’s not one or the other.
@Catherine Sims: did someone say that it was? I was just addressing the previous comment.
Always take one research study with a grain of salt, lets see if it’s reproduced in other studies first. These stories come out all the time and the press, usually ignorant of how basic scientific research is conducted, thinks one study = everything. Hence why coffee is good for you one week bad the next, different studies have different methodology and standards and are not all equal, though this one seems promising.
If you want an idea of how a study can fall on it’s face check out shark carteledge for cancer. Also always look to see if the study was done in vitro or in vivo ie in the lab or in a real person, loads of really promising results in vitro go nowhere in vivo. What’s good for one cancer also isn’t gonna necessarily work for another, chemos almost useless for some cancers in traditional form. Think of cancer more like an umbrella term rather than one disease.
@John B: meant for James not you John sorry !!
Hair loss is not a side effect of breast radiation as treatment side effects (apart from fatigue) are localised to the area of treatment only.
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