HealthDay Reporter
MONDAY, Sept. 26, 2016 (HealthDay News) — Cutting-edge radiation therapy seems to provide a significant survival advantage for older people with early stage lung cancer who aren’t strong enough for surgery, a pair of new studies suggests.
The therapy is called stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT) and it’s been available for about a decade.
The first study reviewed national cancer data and found that survival rates for older lung cancer patients treated with radiation therapy increased dramatically between 2004 and 2012. Those are the years during which SBRT use became widespread in the United States, said lead researcher Dr. Andrew Farach, a radiation oncologist at Houston Methodist Hospital.
A second study based on Veterans Affairs cancer treatment data appears to corroborate the national findings, directly linking increased use of SBRT with improved survival rates in elderly patients.
Farach said the results show that radiation therapy should be strongly considered for early stage patients who, due to age or poor health, aren’t good candidates for surgery.
“Surgery is the gold standard for operable patients right now, but over half of patients can’t receive surgery in the elderly population,” Farach said.
“We were pretty astounded to see the number of patients who don’t receive any treatment at all — it’s almost equal to the numbers who receive radiation therapy. These patients might benefit from SBRT,” he said.
However, there might be factors other than SBRT that would explain the improvement in survival rates, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld. He’s the deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.
For example, medical science has gotten better at sorting out people who have early stage cancer versus those whose cancer has spread beyond the initial tumor, Lichtenfeld said.
The improvement observed by Farach and his colleagues might be due to radiation therapy used more appropriately on patients who will benefit most, he explained.
“This paper is informative and interesting, but it is not definitive,” Lichtenfeld said. “It doesn’t answer the question of whether radiation is as good as surgery.”
In fact, Lichtenfeld pointed out that even with the improvements in this study, radiation therapy had just a 58 percent two-year survival rate compared with 84 percent for surgery.
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