Mammograms have very low risk of radiation

A new study from Canada suggests that the potential cancer risk from radiation during a mammogram is very small compared to the benefits of lives saved from early detection of the breast cancer.

Said  Martin Yafee researcher at Sunnybrook hospital in Toronto, “This risk of radiation-induced breast cancers is mentioned periodically by women and people who are critiquing screening [and how often it should be done and in whom.”

Added Dr Arnold Rotter from the radiology department at City of Hope Cancer center in Duarte, CA, "This study says that the good obtained from having a screening mammogram far exceeds the risk you might have from the radiation received from the low-dose mammogram,"

Dr Yaffe and his team  developed a mathematical model to estimate the risk of radiation-induced breast cancer following exposure to radiation from mammograms, and then estimated the number of breast cancers, fatal breast cancers and years of life lost attributable to the mammography's screening radiation. They applied this model to hypothetical data from women who undergo mammograms.

What they found: If 100,000 women got annual mammograms from ages 40 to 55 and then got mammograms every other year until age 74, 86 breast cancers and 11 deaths would be attributable to the mammography radiation.

Simply put another way, Jaffe said: "Your chances are one in 1,000 of developing a breast cancer from the radiation. Your chances of dying are one in 10,000. But the lifetime risk of breast cancer is estimated at about one in eight or nine.” he added.

"I'm not minimizing the concern of radiation," Rotter said. "Everything is a balance." For example, younger breasts, particularly those of women aged 40 to 49, are more sensitive to radiation than breasts in older women, but the new study shows it's better to get the screening mammography than skip it.

Elderly can undergo aggressive lung cancer treatments

For many years, the trend in North America has been to treat elderly people who have lung cancer with conservative chemotherapy. The reason for this is that it was always felt that the elderly were fragile and would not be able to tolerate the harsh chemotherapeutic drugs. Well, now a major study indicates that this thinking is wrong. A recent study from France reveals that elderly patients lived longer, cancer free and had a decent quality of life after aggressive chemotherapy.

"These results demonstrate that a more intensive regimen given to younger patients can be effective and tolerable in this (elderly) group," said lead researcher Dr. Elisabeth Quoix

Younger patients with lung cancer have always been offered a combination of drugs but elderly have in the past only been offered one drug. This was chiefly because of physicians fear that the elderly may not tolerate the side effects well.

Researchers in France looked at 451 patients between the age of 70- 89 and offered them single or multiple chemotherapeutic drugs for their lung cancer. The study had to be stopped because the researchers observed that the overall survival period for patients given the combination chemotherapy was 10.4 months compared to 6.2 months for those getting only one drug. They also noticed that patients receiving two cancer drugs lived twice as long and the side effects were easily tolerated.

Dr. Mark Kris, chief of thoracic oncology at Memorial-Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York and ASCO representative, said that the impact of this trial is  "huge."

Kris says "the message of this paper is really important" because it encourages oncologists to look beyond their patient's chronological age and if the patient is fit enough, doctors should have the "confidence to give the best treatment available to older adults with the anticipation of getting the same benefits and side effects."

Kris said, "Of all the trials, this one is the one with the most immediate impact" because doctors and patients can take this information and use it next week.