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news.Cancer researchers at Yale New Haven Hospital and the Cancer Institute of New Jersey have suggested that giving radiation therapy and chemotherapy at the same time after a lumpectomy helps keep breast cancer from returning.
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For early-stage breast cancer, the standard treatment is a lumpectomy followed by radiation therapy. When to give the chemotherapy has been widely debated among researchers.
The outcome for the women in the study was successful across the group, with 10-year overall survival at 78%. Doctors found that there was no significant difference in the way combinations affected the general patient outcome, but there was a difference in where tumors could relapse.
Of the 109 patients who received chemotherapy and radiation therapy at the same time, only 8% relapsed locally. Of the women who received radiation therapy before chemotherapy, 13% had a local relapse while 22% of the women who had chemotherapy before radiation had a local relapse.
“In this retrospective analysis, by concurrently administering chemotherapy and radiation therapy, there appears to be a benefit to selected patients in terms of local control of the breast cancer. The challenge over the next few years is to identify those patients who would best benefit from this strategy,” said Bruce Haffty, radiation oncologist at Robert Johnson Wood Medical School-UMDNJ.