|
medpundit |
||
 |
 |
|
Sunday, December 18, 2005The breast cancer survival rate rises if a patient has radiotherapy after having a lump removed, a study says. The five-year risk of cancer returning after a lumpectomy drops from 26% to 7% if the radiation treatment is used, a University of Oxford team found. The study was one of those that combined results of a bunch of different studies and put them through a statistical sieve. It did find that the chances of having a breast cancer in the same breast as the original declined quite a bit: Among the 25 000 women in the comparisons that involved substantial (>10%) differences, however, 5-year local recurrence risks were 7% active versus 26% control (absolute reduction 19%).... But the improval in survival wasn't so great: ..... and 15-year breast cancer mortality risks were 44.6% versus 49.5% (absolute reduction 5.0%...) What are the drawbacks to radiation? Some are cosmetic - the skin becomes permanently darker in the area of the beam. (One of my patients once had a rude customer at her shop who reached over with a licked finger and tried to rub off the pigmentation on her neck while exclaiming, "Honey, your neck is dirty!" No accounting for some people.) But, others are more serious than that, including cancer in the other breast, cancer in other places, and heart disease: There was, at least with some of the older radiotherapy regimens, a significant excess incidence of contralateral breast cancer (rate ratio 1·18....) and a significant excess of non-breast-cancer mortality in irradiated women (rate ratio 1·12....). Both were slight during the first 5 years, but continued after year 15. The excess mortality was mainly from heart disease (rate ratio 1·27....) and lung cancer (rate ratio 1·78....). Odd that they would express those risks only in rate ratios and not in absolute terms as they did for the rest of the findings. More details on the side effects of radiation therapy can be found here. posted by Sydney on 12/18/2005 08:49:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
|
