Breast Cancer Treatment Reduced From Six Weeks To Five Days.

A new therapy to treat breast cancer reduces the radiation time from six weeks to five days.

A new therapy to treat breast cancer reduces the radiation time from six weeks to five days. This is very useful for the patients as it is less convenient. Doctors can point the radiation source at the tumor killing the cancer cells.

The study compares the usefulness of the new therapy over the conventional six-week treatment. They are also in the process of analyzing the suitable subjects for this therapy.

But the Canadians are working on a new therapy for breast cancer, which reduces the treatment time to just 24 hours.

This can be possible by implanting radiation seeds permanently in the patient’s breast thereby facilitating the destruction of cancer cells. This method helps the patient o continue with their normal routine.

This new method of treatment of breast cancer is called partial-breast radiation therapy.

But experts have their reservations and tell the patients who opt or the new therapy to enroll them in the study wherein they are testing the feasibility of the new approach.

But Dr. Norman Coleman working at the national cancer institute questions the researchers the effectiveness of the new therapy as this can work well in few patients and only very few patients are followed to ensure that this is therapy works better than the conventional one.

Dr. Frank Vicini of William Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak, Mich., who initiated the five-day approach and is currently presiding the new NCI study.

He said that around 200,000 American (70%) suffering from breast cancer patients opt for a lumpectomy (removal of the tumor) and not the removal of the entire breast.

In addition to lumpectomy radiation helps in the treatment of early-stage breast cancer.

Partial-breast radiation is a very useful tehnique in the prevention of recurrence of breast cancer and also reduces the side effects faced during the conventional methods.