Cancer Cure News 2017: Lung Cancer Treatments Could Be Bad for the Heart, New Research Suggests
Radiation treatment for lung cancer could come with a huge trade-off, as a new research found out. Radiotherapy doses that affect the heart carry an increased risk of early death in lung cancer patients, as evidence of lower survival rates for those taking this treatment suggests.
Lung cancer patients now have wider access to radiation treatments, thanks to advances in radiation technology. Radiotherapy is more viable as an option now that breakthroughs have made the technology more applicable to a larger part of lung cancer patients.
Evidence over the past two years, however, show an increasing mortality rate for lung cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy, according to MedicalXpress.
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This worrying trend has prompted Dr. Alan McWilliam to carry out research into why this is so. They looked at a total of 1,101 patients to identify how radiation therapy could be putting patients at risk of early death, and the answer lies with the heart.
"We found that the radiation may cause an extra burden on the heart and even small amounts of radiation may have an effect," McWilliams said.
"We have identified the top of the heart in particular as a dose-sensitive region, where excess dose results in poorer patient survival," he explained, referring to the "top" or base of the heart where the atriums are situated.
When this portion of the heart is hit by a high dose of radiation therapy, patients have an increased risk of early death, up by as much as 20 percent than compared to a lower dose, McWilliams added.
Unfortunately for lung cancer patients, the close proximity of the lungs to the heart usually means that radiation will unavoidably hit the dose-sensitive base of the organ over the course of therapy. The higher the dose, the worse the rate of patient survival gets.
New techniques for targeting tumors with radiation therapy could go a long way to avoid this issue, as this new research just confirmed.
