M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and several other centers, examined the results of 597 patients treated with concurrent chemotherapy and daily chest radiation. They found that on average, patients who received the concurrent treatment lived 17 months. Those treated sequentially lived an average of 14.6 months. Dr. Curran, who is chairman of the Radiation Therapy Oncology Group , a federally funded cancer clinical trials group which carries out multi-disciplinary research nationwide and which conducted the trial, presents his team s findings May 23 at the annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in New Orleans. Locally advanced non-small cell lung cancer is diagnosed annually in approximately 50,000 Americans.
Surgery offers little to such patients, leaving radiation and chemotherapy.
Patients in the current study were assigned to one of three arms. Patients in arm one received the standard sequential chemotherapy and chest radiation. In arm three, patients were given a slightly different schedule of the same chemotherapy drugs, along with radiation therapy twice daily. We conclude that there may be an advantage to concurrent therapy, but there doesn t appear to be an advantage with twice a day radiation, he says. This study provides strong support for continuing to investigate chemotherapy and radiation delivered concurrently.