Does radiation therapy improve survival for women with DCIS

besa

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2016-02-therapy-surv...

"For their retrospective, longitudinal study, Golshan and colleagues examined data from more than 32,000 patients treated for DCIS, including more than 20,000 who received radiation therapy and breast cancer surgery and more than 11,000 who received breast cancer surgery alone. Breast cancer mortality rates at 10 years were low for both groups: 1.8 percent for the group that received radiation therapy and 2.1 percent for the group that did not.

The team then assigned each patient a validated prognostic score on a scale of zero to six based on a set of three risk factors: nuclear grade (a measure of how abnormal cells look under a microscope); patient's age; and tumor size. Patients with a higher nuclear grade, younger age and/or larger DCIS received a higher score; those with a lower nuclear grade, older age and/or smaller DCIS received a lower score. Past studies have shown that a patient's prognostic score can predict breast cancer recurrence, but such scores had not previously been used to assess the effectiveness of treatment decisions on long term breast cancer survival.

The team found that for patients with higher prognostic scores, radiation therapy conferred a significant survival benefit. Those with scores of four or five saw a near 70 percent reduction in breast cancer mortality if they received radiation therapy. For patients with low scores, however, there was no significant difference in breast cancer mortality with or without radiation therapy...."

ksusan

Thanks. I couldn't tell from the article whether we're talking about people with lumpectomy or whether mastectomy was also evaluated.

besa

Ksusan -Looking at the original article the study was of 32,144 women over the age of 20 who received breast conserving surgery after being diagnosed with a first case of DCIS between 1988 - 2007 (patients with microinvasion or Paget Disease of the breast were excluded from the study).

ksusan

Thanks!