Jun 07
8
Breast Cancer Patients May Be OK with Less Radiation
A news story recently came out about how less radiation treatment is being ok’d as a treatment for breast cancer. What exactly does this mean? Well, hopefully a good thing! The large study is suggesting that women with beginning stage breast cancer, with smaller tumors, may not need as much radiation therapy as once thought, in order that they may have less chance as a breast cancer recurrence later in life, which was the reason and the fear behind great radiation treatments before this news came out.
Normally, early stage breast cancer patients were subjected to an intense regimen of radiation therapy, for five weeks straight, every single day. For women with early stage breast cancer, this regimen was very trying, especially for mothers or full time workers. Not only that, radiation not only destroys cancer cells as we all know, it also destroys healthy, productive cells as well, and is responsible for sickness and weakness because of its cell destroying capabilities. It’s not quite as harsh as chemo, but it is by far not the most pleasant experience either.Â
Apparently, in cancer that is still confined to the breast, radiation therapy is mostly done for the simple reason to prevent a recurrence further down the line. It is largely precautionary, but it also may help to shrink the existing breast cancer tumors. Of course, the study only involved so many years follow up at this point, with the longer and shorter radiation patients seemingly have the same recurrence rate, that it still is prudent to assume we would still need further follow up years down the line to compare the recurrence rate of patients who received the more lengthy radiation treatments vs. patients that received the shorter radiation treatments, and researchers are planning on doing just that. Only one problem with that, we have to wait!
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