Charlie Chaplin

DENVER, Oct. 18 (UPI) -- Cutting chemotherapy 50 percent, reducing by half the amount of the body that receives radiation, and reducing the radiation dose by one-third still allows effective treatment for Hodgkin's lymphoma Ugg günstig, a form of cancer that often attacks younger individuals, new research shows.
In a study in Germany that enrolled 1,131 patients, researchers assigned subjects to receive either a full course of four cycles of chemotherapy plus a full course of radiation. Or, they assigned reduced courses of treatment with either chemotherapy or radiation. A fourth alternative included both reduced chemotherapy and reduced radiation.
"After four years of follow-up, we could find no statistical differences in survival among the four treatment arms," said Dr. Rolf-Peter Mueller, head of the department of radiation therapy at the University of Cologne, Germany.
Overall survival ranged from 94 percent to 97 percent for these patients with early-stage Hodgkin's disease.
Mueller reported the results on behalf of the German Hodgkin Study Group Trial HD10 at the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology's annual meeting, a weeklong gathering that has attracted more than 10,000 doctors and researchers.
Hodgkin's disease, also known as Hodgkin's lymphoma, is a cancer that begins in lymphatic tissue. Lymphatic tissue includes the lymph nodes and related organs that are part of the body's immune and blood-forming systems. The lymph nodes are small Vente ugg, bean-shaped organs found beneath the skin in the neck, underarm and groin.
The American Cancer Society reports that about 7,350 cases of Hodgkin's lymphoma will be diagnosed this year in the United States ugg prix, and about 64,000 Americans will fall ill to all forms of lymphoma. Its cause remains unknown.
"This is an interim study ugg cheap," Mueller said at a news briefing Monday, "in that the full results are not expected for another two years. However, in Hodgkin's lymphoma Ugg uk, relapses almost always occur during the first two years after treatment, so we are confident these results will be very close to the final analysis."
Mueller said the ability to reduce radiation and chemotherapy will prove beneficial to patients by reducing radiation-induced cancers later in life.
"We can lower the radiation dose from 30 Gray to 20 Gray -- one third," Mueller told United Press International. "We can reduce by one-half the radiation to the body area of the patient. We can reduce the number of cycles of chemotherapy by one-half -- from four to two."
He said the results indicated there were no differences in disease recurrence from one group of patients to another -- about 2.5 percent of patients in the entire trial relapsed -- and there were no significant differences in toxicity among the four study groups, although those getting the highest doses tended to have the greatest number of side effects.
"This is a practice-changing study," said Dr. Theodore Lawrence, professor and chairman of the department of radiation oncology at the University of Michigan School of Medicine in Ann Arbor.
"We think this is an important study," said Lawrence, the moderator of the news briefing, "because the radiation dose and the region of radiation can both be reduced without losing effectiveness. This means patients can look forward to a normal, healthy life with less risk of developing cancers that can be induced by radiation. Some of these patients are in their teens and early 20s ugg deutschland, and can now look forward to 50 or 60 more years of life."
Mueller said the reduction in radiation "almost certainly means the risk of secondary cases of cancer would be much less."
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Edward Susman covers medical research for UPI. E-mail: healthbiz@upi.com
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