Friday, June 03, 2016
Beaumont research findings published in Journal of Thoracic Oncology
When surgery is not an option for those with non-small cell lung cancer, is radiation therapy always beneficial or helpful for all patients? That’s a question Beaumont researchers studied with radiation oncologists worldwide.
Their findings were recently published in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. Contributing author, principal investigator for the international group, and Beaumont Hospital, Royal Oak radiation oncologist, Inga S. Grills, M.D., explained, “All patients benefited from the radiation therapy. There was no subset of patients with medically inoperable cancer, regardless of baseline breathing function or other serious medical problems, that did not benefit from stereotactic body radiation therapy.”
Researchers asked: Is there a patient population at such high risk of early death such that there is no potential benefit of SBRT? The answer was no.
“Traditionally, patients with early stage non-small cell lung cancer are treated surgically. However, some patients are not eligible for surgery, because they have heart disease or COPD,” said Dr. Grills. “The patients considered medically inoperable can still be treated curatively with radiation therapy known as stereotactic body radiation therapy.”
Stereotactic body radiation therapy, also referred to as SBRT, uses advanced imaging and treatment techniques to deliver targeted high-dose radiation to a tumor in just a few treatments.
The research group includes institutions from: Canada, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and the U.S. The program, with about 1,100 pooled patients looks at outcomes after stereotactic body radiation therapy and has published many papers on this subject.
It’s the No. 1 cause of cancer deaths in the U.S. among men and women – lung cancer. In fact, about 25 percent of all cancer deaths can be attributed to lung cancer. According to the American Cancer Society, each year, more people die of lung cancer than of colon, breast and prostate cancers combined.
Beaumont Health’s radiation oncologists are part of an international collaborative studying the effectiveness of stereotactic body radiation therapy in treating non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC. Non-small cell lung cancer is the most common: about 80-85 percent of lung cancers are NSCLC.
With the new Proton Therapy Center opening in 2017 at Beaumont’s Cancer Center in Royal Oak, a new tool will be available to treat some types of lung and thoracic cancers. Proton therapy is a high-tech alternative to X-ray radiation that may allow for better avoidance of normal tissues. A scanning beam of proton radiation with online image guidance offers greater precision to destroy cancerous cells, sparing adjacent healthy tissue and reducing treatment side effects.