Study Looks At Acupuncture For Reduction Of Radiotherapy-Induced Nausea

Despite widespread belief among cancer patients and health care professionals that acupuncture helps relieve nausea caused by cancer treatment, new research in radiotherapy has found it does not.

The study, presented at the European Cancer Conference (ECCO 14) in Barcelona, evaluated the effectiveness of acupuncture in 215 patients with various types of cancer who got either active acupuncture or a sham treatment that involved an identical looking and feeling needle that retracted into the handle on contact with the skin.

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Real-Time System Used To Plant 'Seeds' Against Cancer

Radiation oncologists and urologists at the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital in Philadelphia have begun using a real-time system to implant radiation-emitting seeds in prostate cancer patients. While the system, which is made by Nucletron, a technology company based in The Netherlands, is only being used for imaging and planning purposes so far, it ultimately will help with the actual placement of the seeds. To date, Jefferson is the first medical center in the Delaware Valley to begin employing the new system.

The multidisciplinary team of urologists, surgeons, radiation oncologists, radiation physicists and others involved in using the device are hoping that the new federal Food and Drug Administration-approved technology will make an already good system even better, adding scientific precision to a treatment that currently relies mainly on physician experience and skill.

source article Medical News Today

Internal Radiotherapy Better for Endometrial Cancer patients

Quality of life after treatment for endometrial cancer can be significantly improved by the use of vaginal brachytherapy, where radiotherapy is delivered internally using a vaginal cylinder, the European Cancer Conference (ECCO 14) heard today (Monday September 24).

Dr. Remi Nout, from the clinical oncology department of the Leiden University Medical Centre, Leiden, The Netherlands, said that this quality of life benefit would be an important factor to take into account when balancing the risks and benefits of using vaginal brachytherapy or external beam pelvic radiotherapy after surgery.

“Up till now we have known very little about the quality of life of women with endometrial cancer,” he said, “and how radiotherapy impacts on it. This is the first analysis of data from a randomised trial on the subject.

source article Huliq.com

Beaumont Patients 1st to get Next Generation of Radiation Treatment

ROYAL OAK, Mich., Sept. 20 /PRNewswire/ -- Cancer patients at Beaumont Hospitals are the first in the world to be treated with the next generation of radiation therapy that is painless, faster, more accurate and precise than other treatments.

Beaumont doctors and physicists invented and patented the new technology, Omnibeam®. The $3.3-million machine is manufactured in England by Elekta, which is headquartered in Stockholm. The first patient was treated on Sept. 10.

The painless treatment takes about 20 minutes and requires no implants or invasive procedures to prepare for therapy. It can be used to treat cancer of the breast; prostate; lungs; and head and neck, as well as other cancers. It is specially designed for the treatment of tumors deep within the body.


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Radiation technique cuts prostate cancer treatment time

DALLAS – Sept. 20, 2007 – Researchers have launched a clinical trial for prostate cancer that will test a new type of radiation treatment that can be completed in five 30-minute sessions.

Led by Dr. Robert Timmerman, vice chairman of radiation oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern, the researchers will test the effectiveness of stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), a relatively new technique that delivers very high doses of focused radiation to precisely targeted tumors. Dr. Timmerman has successfully used the technique to treat patients with lung and liver cancers.

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Radiation Therapy To Prevent Brain Tumours Can Improve Survival For Small-Cell Lung Cancer Patients

Patients with small-cell lung cancer who receive a course of radiation therapy to their heads after responding to chemotherapy live longer and are less likely to develop secondary brain tumours, a common feature of this disease, than those who are offered no further treatment, according to the results of a randomised controlled trial, published in the New England Journal of Medicine (N Engl J Med 2007; 357: 664-72)

Small-cell lung cancer, which mainly occurs in current or former smokers, spreads quickly and is rapidly fatal. Advances in treatment have done little to improve survival rates over the past 25 years and brain metastases are common with this disease. At least 18% of patients already have secondary brain tumours when they get their diagnosis and at 2 years 80% of patients show symptoms of brain involvement.

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Varian Medical Systems and BrainLAB Join Forces to Introduce Novalis® Tx

Novalis® Tx unveiled at the Congress of Neurological Surgeons (CNS) meeting in San Diego, California

September 18, 2007 – Palo Alto, Calif. – In a move to offer superior noninvasive treatment options for patients, Varian Medical Systems, Inc. (NYSE:VAR) and BrainLAB have teamed up to create Novalis® Tx, integrating the most successful radiosurgery technologies from both companies for imaging, treatment planning, and treatment delivery.

Novalis Tx integrates Varian’s Trilogy® Tx linear accelerator and new HD120 multi-leaf collimator offering 2.5 mm leaves for finer beam shaping. This ultra-precise radiosurgical instrument will use a variety of standard and configurable options including Varian’s On-board Imager® device, the BrainLAB ExacTrac® X-Ray 6D room mounted X-Ray imaging system, BrainLAB iPlan® treatment planning software as well as Varian’s Eclipse™ treatment planning and ARIA™ information management software.

“This powerful platform enables both companies to offer radiation oncologists, neurosurgeons and other medical specialists the sharpest knife available for radiosurgery,” said Tim Guertin president and CEO of Varian Medical Systems.

full press release here

Radiation Overdose Scandal is Much Higher in France

Health Minister Roselyne Bachelot said the cancer overdose radiation scandal is much higher than previously thought following the discovery of 300 new cases.

A total of 721 men suffering from prostate cancer are now known to have received excessive amounts of radiation due to a calibration error at the Epinal general hospital between 1999 and 2006. Twenty-four were seriously affected and five of these have died.

When the scandal was first revealed earlier this year, only 421 cases were identified.

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Accuray Receives FDA Clearance For New Dose Calculation Technique For Body Radiosurgery

Accuray Incorporated (Nasdaq: ARAY), a global leader in the field of radiosurgery, announced today that its Monte Carlo Dose Calculation algorithm has received 510(k) clearance from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and is now commercially available worldwide. This announcement was made as part of the product's launch at the 9th Biennial European Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ESTRO) meeting on Physics and Radiation Technology for Clinical Radiotherapy in Barcelona, Spain.

Treatment with radiation therapy or radiosurgery requires a linear accelerator to deliver one or more x-ray beams to a target. Each beam is made up of trillions of photons, and each photon follows an individual path to the target. Traditional dose calculation methods assume all photons take a single path and therefore use a single calculation to represent the dose delivered by all photons

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Radiation to the Pelvis Reduces Relapses in Prostate Cancer

According to an article recently published in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics, radiation administered to the whole pelvis (whole-pelvic radiation) extends biochemical relapse-free survival (bRFS) compared with radiation directed just at the prostate and surrounding tissues among men with early prostate cancer who are at a high risk of developing a recurrence.

Prostate cancer is one of the most common cancers diagnosed in men in the United States. Early prostate cancer refers to cancer that has not spread to distant sites in the body. Depending upon the extent of spread, patient age, aggressiveness of the cancer, and patient wishes, early (localized) prostate cancer may be treated with radiation therapy, watchful waiting (no therapy until disease progression), cryotherapy, surgery, and/or hormone therapy. A priority among healthcare providers is to utilize therapies that provide optimal outcomes with little or no impact on quality of life.

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Modern Radiation Therapy Ups Lung Cancer Survival

Modern 3-D radiation therapy has been proven to be more successful at curing lung cancer than older 2-D radiation therapy for some patients with early stage lung cancer, according to a new study in a recent edition of the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology, Physics.

Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) accounts for 87 percent of all lung cancers diagnosed. Currently, the best treatment for stage I NSCLC is surgery or stereotactic radiation therapy (SRT), often followed by chemotherapy if the lesion is larger than 3 cm or radiotherapy and chemotherapy if the surgical margin or hilar or mediastinal nodes are positive at the time of operation. The five-year survival outcomes are very high, with 50 percent to 67 percent of these patients living at least five years after diagnosis if patients have a well-staged stage I NSCLC.

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Radiation Therapy and Drug Combo is Effective in Treating Lung Cancer

A combination of radiation therapy and bavituximab, a monoclonal antibody that helps destroy blood vessels nourishing malignant tumours, is more effective in treating lung cancer than either approach alone, say researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center.

The researchers based their results on the findings of a study in which human lung-cancer cells were implanted in mice.

Dr. Philip Thorpe, professor of pharmacology, says that radiation generates a chemical reaction in the membranes of endothelial cells, which line the blood vessels that feed tumours. The reaction causes membrane components called anionic phospholipids to flip inside out, exposing them, he says.



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Left-sided breast cancer radiation ups heart risk

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Women with early-stage cancer of the left breast who are treated with radiation as a component of breast-sparing treatment, have an increased risk of developing radiation-related coronary damage, researchers report.

Nevertheless, "the benefits of radiation therapy for breast cancer still clearly outweigh the risks," Dr. Candace R. Correa told Reuters Health. "However," she added, "there may still be room for improvement in radiation techniques," when radiation is applied to the breast on the same side as the heart.

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