A new study indicates that radiotherapy targeted may eradicate cancer disease in patients with less than 5 distant metastases.

A new study indicates that radiotherapy targeted may eradicate cancer disease in patients with less than 5 distant metastases. The report indicates that correctly targeted radiation therapy has great chances of eradicating almost all evidence of disease in those patients with cancer which has spread to only a selected number of sites.

A recent study on this is expected to be published in the August issue of the “Journal Clinical Cancer Research”. This study involved twenty nine patients who suffer from stage-4 cancer with 1 to 5 distant metastases and tumours lesser than 10 cm or 4 inches in diameter. The participants were injected 3 doses, separated by at least 2 days, of correctly targeted radiation therapy focused completely on each metastatic tumour.

A total of fifty-six lesions were treated during the study. The results have shown that fifty-five percent of the tumours disappeared completely. And two tumours (i.e. four percent) had partial response. Partial response is defined as when tumour volume reduces more than thirty percent.

Only 3 of the total 56 tumours progressed further (5 percent), i.e. growing in size by more than twenty percent during the whole treatment phase. The study further suggests that tumour control only improved when the radiation dose was increased.