Rectal Cancer Patients May Not Need Radiation, Study Finds
That was why researchers took another look at the standard treatment for rectal cancer.
For decades, it was typical to use pelvic radiation. But the radiation puts women into immediate menopause and damages sexual function in men and women. It also can injure the bowel, causing issues like chronic diarrhea. Patients risk pelvic fractures, and the radiation can cause additional cancers.
Yet radiation treatment, the study found, did not improve outcomes. After a median follow-up of five years, there was no difference in key measures — the length of survival with no signs that the cancer has returned, and overall survival — between the group that had received the treatment and the group that had not. And, after 18 months, there was no difference between the two groups in quality of life.
For colon and rectal cancer specialists, the results can transform their patients’ lives, said Dr. Kimmie Ng, a co-director of the colon and rectal cancer center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not an author of the study.
“Now, especially, with patients skewing younger and younger, do they actually need radiation?” she asked. “Can we choose which patients can get away without this extremely toxic treatment that can lead to lifelong consequences, such as infertility and sexual dysfunction?”
Dr. John Plastaras, a radiation oncologist at the Penn Medicine Abramson Cancer Center, said the results “certainly are interesting,” but he added that he would like to see the patients followed for a longer time before concluding that outcomes with the two treatment options were equivalent.
Source: The New York Times
