What? Are they crazy or crooked?

No Benefit With External-Beam Radiation for Endometrial Cancer

YOU KNOW WHAT’S SHOCKING ABOUT THIS REPORT? THEY ADMIT THAT THIS RADIATION ABUSE AND DAMAGE (AS RECORDED) HAS BEEN DONE FOR OVER 40 YEARS WITHOUT ANY SCIENCE OR JUSTIFICATION BEHIND IT. HERE IT IS DESCRIBED AS JUST A “TRADITION”. That's how insane a lot of cancer "science" is!

June 22, 2007 (Chicago) — A new trial is calling into question the decades-long tradition of combining radiation and surgery for patients with early endometrial cancer. Researchers here at the American Society of Clinical Oncology 43rd Annual Meeting report that adjuvant external beam radiation does not extend survival or reduce recurrence but does boost the risk for adverse effects.

"We've been able to look at that 30- or 40-year tradition to see whether it's supported by data, and we've shown that it is not supported by evidence," said senior investigator Peter Blake, MD, working on behalf of a group from the Medical Research Council Clinical Trials Unit, in London, United Kingdom, and the National Cancer Institute of Canada Clinical Trials Group, in Toronto, Ontario.

Ann Marie Swart, MRCP, a senior clinical epidemiologist and 1 of the trial collaborators, presented the findings at a news conference. "Our study is the first to question the impact of radiotherapy on these women," Dr. Swart told Medscape. "The trend to withdraw conventional treatment has already started to happen, but I think now clinicians can be much more confident in doing so."

The prospective, randomized trial enrolled 905 women with early-stage endometrial cancer. About half of patients received radiation while the rest did not. After a median follow-up of 51 months, overall survival and recurrence did not differ significantly between the 2 groups. Five-year overall survival was 84% in both groups. The proportion of women who were recurrence-free after 5 years was also similar, at 79% for women who received radiation vs 76% for those who did not.

"We were surprised at how well the patients as a whole did," Dr. Blake told Medscape. "When we designed this study in the mid-1990s, we were not expecting to see such high survival rates, and I think to some extent this is reflecting modern imaging techniques and much more accurate histological assessments," he said.

"This is exciting news out of the gynecological community," press briefing moderator Julie Gralow, MD, from the University of Washington, in Seattle, told reporters. "We can avoid giving patients radiation without any complications."

While you are on with it, how about apologizing to all the women hurt by this stupid and unscientific “tradition”?

American Society of Clinical Oncology 43rd Annual Meeting: Abstract 5504. Presented June 3, 2007.

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