LUNG CANCER , SURGERY MAY YIELD BETTER RESULTS
Patients with early
stage non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who are otherwise healthy fare better
over time if they undergo conventional surgery versus less-invasive
radiosurgery to remove their cancer, according to a Yale study. The findings
are scheduled to be presented at the 56th annual conference of the American
Society for Radiation Oncology in San Francisco
The
study used Medicare billing records of 1,078 lung cancer patients age 67 and
older from across the United States to assess shorter- and longer-term
complications and outcomes related to surgery versus radiosurgery (also known
as stereotactic body radiotherapy, or SBRT). The patients were treated in
academic and private practice settings of all sizes.
While the findings generally support current practices of
treating healthier NSCLC patients with surgery rather than radiosurgery,
researchers were surprised by how much better surgical patients fared
long-term, said the study's first author, James B. Yu, M.D., assistant
professor of therapeutic radiology at Yale School of Medicine and a member of
Yale Cancer Center.
"What was dramatic to me was the relatively high rate of
complications and death among surgical patients in the first three months
compared with how much better they did than radiosurgery patients after 12
months, " Yu said. "While surgery may be associated with infections
and complications in the short-term, it appears that patients healthy enough to
undergo surgery live longer."
Yu said researchers were unable to account for unknown factors
that may have affected outcomes, such as whether patients who underwent surgery
had more accurate assessment of the disease's spread than those who did not;
and determining definitively that surgical patients were healthier than
radiosurgery patients at the time of procedure.
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