Patients were recruited between April 2014 and July 2016. Thirty-one cancerous lesions were treated with radiation in the 14 patients.
People who received chemoradiation experienced a remission nearly triple that of a 15-person control group who got just chemotherapy — 9.7 months compared with 3.5 months, said lead researcher Dr. Puneeth Iyengar.
Only four of those who received radiation therapy have had renewed progression of their cancer, compared with 10 out of 15 patients in the chemo-only group, Iyengar said.
He’s an assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas.
The chemoradiation patients didn’t have any cancer recurrences (failures) “within the areas that were irradiated, whereas a multitude of patients [in the control group] failed in areas that would have gotten radiation had they been in that arm of the trial,” Iyengar said.
“Clearly, local [radiation] treatment improved the control of the disease and also delayed the time to progression,” Iyengar concluded.
Movsas called these results a “paradigm shift” in the way radiation therapy can help treat patients with advanced lung cancer.
“This is really changing the way we are thinking about patients with lung cancer that has spread to certain areas,” Movsas said.
In both clinical trials, chemoradiation therapy had side effects similar to those produced by chemotherapy alone, Movsas added.
“Overall, it was pretty well-tolerated,” he said.
SOURCES: Benjamin Movsas, M.D., radiation oncologist, Henry Ford Hospital, Detroit; Jeffrey Bradley, M.D., director, S.L. King Center for Proton Therapy, Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis; Puneeth Iyengar, M.D., Ph.D., assistant professor, radiation oncology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas; Sept. 24, 2017 presentations, American Society of Radiation Oncology meeting, San Diego