SBRT For Lung Cancer Report Released By ASTRO

The American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) has released its Emerging Technology Committee's report evaluating the use of stereotactic body radiotherapy (SBRT) in lung cancer treatment.

SBRT is a newer radiation therapy treatment that uses focused radiation beams to target a well-defined tumor and relies on detailed imaging, computerized three-dimensional treatment planning and precise treatment setup to deliver the radiation dose with extreme accuracy to any part of the body, excluding the brain or spine. It typically uses higher radiation doses in fewer treatments than other standard treatments.

Historically, the preferred treatment for lung cancer patients is surgery, but numerous lung cancer patients are unfit for surgery due to the presence of other medical conditions, such as cardiopulmonary disease related to chronic smoking, that put them at an unacceptably high risk of surgical morbidity and mortality. Traditionally six to seven weeks of radiation have been used for this group of patients, but studies showed a high risk of local failure.

source: ASTRO

Smoking During Radiation Therapy For Head And Neck Cancers Linked To Poorer Outcomes

(SACRAMENTO, Calif.) — Smokers who don’t quit before radiation therapy for throat, mouth and other head and neck cancers fair significantly worse than those who do, research from the UC Davis Cancer Center has found.

Allen Chen, an assistant professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at the UC Davis Cancer Center, found that head- and neck-cancer patients who continue to smoke during radiation therapy have poorer 5-year overall survival and higher rates of disease recurrence than those who quit smoking prior to treatment.

The study, published online recently in the International Journal of Radiation Oncology, Biology and Physics, should help oncologists counsel patients about the benefits of quitting smoking after a diagnosis of head and neck cancer, said Chen, lead author of the study.

“I always tell patients, ‘You should really stop smoking,’ but I had no tangible evidence to use to convince them that they would be worse off if they continued to smoke,” Chen said. “I wanted concrete data to see if smoking was detrimental in terms of curability, overall survival and tolerability of treatment. We showed continued tobacco smoking contributed to negative outcomes with regard to all of those.”

source: UC Davis Health System

Varian Medical Systems Introduces a Trilogy® Accelerator With Gated RapidArc® and Advanced Motion Management

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 14 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Varian Medical Systems (NYSE: VAR) has added advanced motion management capabilities including gated RapidArc to its Trilogy platform for treating cancer with targeted radiotherapy. A set of sophisticated new tools now enables clinicians to monitor and adjust for tumor motion during treatment, and to utilize respiratory gating during a RapidArc® treatment.

"Extensive research and development into motion management systems has culminated in powerful new capabilities that will be standard on the new Trilogy accelerators and available as an upgrade on our large installed base of Trilogy and Clinac iX machines," said Dow Wilson, president of Varian's Oncology Systems business. "Our Clinac iX and Trilogy accelerators together with our new TrueBeam platform (see accompanying press release) can now offer clinics an unmatched combination of motion management, speed, and versatility."

Gated RapidArc® radiotherapy makes it possible to monitor patient breathing and compensate for tumor motion while quickly delivering dose during a continuous rotation around the patient. This development enables the use of RapidArc to target lung tumors with greater precision by "gating" the beam—turning it on and off—in response to tumor motion.

source: Varian

Appropriate Radiation Therapy Lacking For Terminal Cancer Patients

A new analysis has found that a considerable proportion of patients with end-stage or terminal cancer do not benefit from palliative radiation therapy (radiotherapy) despite spending most of their remaining life undergoing treatments. Published early online in CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society, the study indicates that greater efforts are needed to tailor appropriately palliative radiotherapy to patients with end-stage cancer.

Palliative radiotherapy for end-stage cancer patients is intended to control cancer-related pain and other symptoms and to help patients maintain a good quality of life when long-term cancer control is not possible. By reducing the number of cancer cells, palliative radiotherapy can ease pain, stop bleeding, and relieve pressure, even when the cancer cannot be controlled. However, for many patients, the treatments are not effective. In addition, if patients are close to death, they may wish to stop treatments if they would like to die at home.

source: Medical News Today

Elekta Introduces Next Generation SBRT for Lung Cancer with Ground-Breaking 4D Image Guidance to Manage Tumor Motion and Enhance Safety

Atlanta, GA (April 8, 2010) /PRNewswire/ — Elekta has introduced an advanced solution for treating lung tumors that enables doctors to visually confirm the tumor's position during the breathing cycle. This new technology treats the lesion with a continuous radiation beam, increasing therapy accuracy while using less imaging radiation during treatment delivery.

Lung tumors have been among the most challenging radiation therapy targets because the patient's breathing causes tumors to move. New research has shown that the lung tumor shifts position from day to day during the course of treatment (baseline shift).1 Doctors often have had to use external skin surface markers or implanted markers to estimate lung tumor position during the breathing cycle and then apply the beam only during certain points in the patient's respiration. These strategies require complex, time-consuming planning and delivery, and prolong treatment with an inefficient stop-start (i.e., gated) beam delivery.

"Elekta's XVI Symmetry™ and XVI Intuity™ completely change the approach when it comes to the treatment of lung tumors," says Dee Mathieson, Senior Vice President, Oncology Business Line Management. "Symmetry provides tools to manage shifts in the relative positions of the tumor and organs-at-risk during the respiratory cycle, and Intuity ensures that not only is the tumor's position accounted for, but also the position of nearby healthy critical structures. This contributes to a more patient-friendly and safe treatment."

source: PR Newswire

Imaging and Conformality Highlighted in Study of TomoTherapy Technology for Craniospinal Irradiation

MADISON, Wis. – April 5, 2010 – TomoTherapy Incorporated (NASDAQ: TOMO), maker of advanced radiation therapy solutions for cancer care, today cited results of a study from McGill University Health Centre (MUHC) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, that showed the benefits of TomoTherapy® technology in a variety of cases requiring craniospinal irradiation (CSI) in children and young adults. The study—entitled “Standard and Nonstandard Craniospinal Radiotherapy Using Helical TomoTherapy” and published online (Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys., March 2010; Epub ahead of print)—concluded that the TomoTherapy platform offers a major dosimetric advantage in treating both standard and complicated cases by utilizing integrated daily imaging and helical radiation delivery to more accurately target tumors and spare surrounding structures and organs.

As reported in the study, “Helical TomoTherapy delivers continuous arc-based [intensity-modulated radiation therapy] (IMRT) that gives high conformality and excellent dose homogeneity for the target volume. Helical TomoTherapy allows for differential dosing of multiple targets resulting in very elegant dose distributions. By its conformal nature, IMRT is very sensitive to improper patient setup. The use of pretreatment [megavoltage CT] (MVCT) imaging with [helical TomoTherapy] allows for increased precision with respect to patient positioning and use of a reduced [planning target volume] (PTV) margin. Daily imaging of our patients has shown the technique to be very reproducible. We conclude that [helical TomoTherapy] is an excellent tool for planning and delivery of conformal IMRT for both standard and nonstandard CSI.”

source: TomoTherapy