Posted on Thu, Feb. 12, 2009
Breast cancer survival rates are already excellent for women with ductal carcinoma in situ or DCIS, but with the addition of radiation therapy, researchers have found that mortality rates may decrease by nearly 51 percent. According to recent studies at the Westmead Hospital in Australia and the University of Sydney, adding radiation therapy to lumpectomy in the treatment of DCIS, a noninvasive form of breast cancer, can substantially decrease the risk of recurrence of either DCIS or invasive breast cancer in the affected breast.
"We wanted to assess whether breast conserving surgery followed by radiotherapy is better than breast conserving surgery alone," says Dr. Annabel Goodwin, study author. "We also wanted to investigate if there was any short- or long-term toxicity from the use of radiotherapy to determine the balance between benefit and harm."
With DCIS, abnormal, precancerous cells form within the milk duct of the breast but do not spread to other parts of the breasts. If left untreated, it substantially increases a woman's chances of developing invasive breast cancer.
The study found that breast conserving surgery-where only the affected part of the breast is removed -followed by radiation therapy can decrease the chance of recurrence of either DCIS or invasive breast cancer.
"This means that for every nine women having breast-conserving surgery [for DCIS], if they all had radiotherapy, one woman would be spared from having a local recurrence of her breast cancer because of the radiotherapy," Goodwin says. She added that the results of two included studies suggested that women over 50 had a greater benefit from the addition of radiotherapy than younger women did.
The researchers also found no evidence of long-term toxicity from the radiation treatment. "Newer techniques of radiation therapy reduce the dose of radiation to the surrounding normal tissues such as the lungs and heart," Goodwin says. "This is likely to reduce the potential long term side effects, but longer term follow up of patients in these studies is needed to confirm this."
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