Radiation adds to lung cancer survival: Study

WASHINGTON, Nov 7: Adding a course of radiation to chemotherapy can double the lives of some lung cancer patients, European researchers reported.

The patients had stage three lung cancer, which has spread to lymph nodes outside the lung but not throughout the body. Such patients often have the visible tumors removed and then get chemotherapy, too, to delay any further spread researchers reported yesterday.

Dr Jean-Yves Douillard of the Centre Rene Gauducheau in St Herblain, France and colleagues in Italy and Spain tested 840 lung cancer patients, of whom 232 agreed to extra radiation treatment.

The treatment doubled survival for some, but not all of the patients, Douillard told a meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Philadelphia.

Among patients whose non small cell lung cancer had spread to certain lymph nodes called mediastinal lymph nodes, radiation therapy helped them live almost two years longer -- 47 versus 24 months on average --than those patients who had only chemotherapy after surgery. This stage of disease is called N2 disease.

But in patients with N1 disease, which has not spread quite as far, adding the radiation therapy appeared to shorten their remaining life span, the researchers found. This would make diagnosis tricky.

''This is the first time that a clinical trial has examined the effectiveness of radiation after surgery for lung cancer,'' Douillard said in a statement.

''The results show that radiation treatment should be considered for resected (surgically treated) non-small cell lung cancer with involved mediastinal lymph nodes in addition to chemotherapy.'' Lung cancer is the world's biggest cancer killer, taking the lives of 95 per cent of its victims. It kills 1.3 million people globally every year -- more than 160,000 in the United States alone.

Because lung cancer rarely causes symptoms until it has spread, most people are not diagnosed until it is too late, and surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can only extend their lives for a few months or years.

REUTERS