Merit Health Woman’s Hospital Promotes Single-dose Breast Cancer Radiotherapy for Older Americans on National Senior Citizens Day
8/26/2021
For decades, the National Comprehensive Cancer Network (NCCN) recommended forgoing post-lumpectomy radiation therapy for women over the age of 70, believing that the patient’s natural life expectancy was shorter than the chance the cancer would recur in 5 or 10 years. While the governing body has recently revised these guidelines, many in the oncology community still hesitate to endorse External Beam Radiation Therapy (EBRT) for elderly patients because of potential side effects such as skin rashes and blistering or fear the treatment will exacerbate existing comorbidities such as heart disease and emphysema.
This National Senior Citizens Day August 21st, Merit Health Woman’s Hospital is emphasizing that there is another option besides the difficult decision between the secondary risks that come with weeks of daily external radiation or no radiation at all. The new therapy offered at the hospital is a single dose of targeted radiation delivered from inside the breast while the patient remains asleep immediately following the removal of the tumor. Merit Health Woman’s Hospital is the only location in Mississippi to offer this therapy.
“For years, many oncologists were between a rock and a hard place when treating breast cancer in senior citizens, weighing the positive outcomes of post-operative radiation treatment verses the side effects specifically detrimental to older patients,” said Phillip Ley, MD, FACS, at Merit Health Woman’s Hospital. This procedure removes those negatives from the equation. Unlike traditional whole breast radiation, which can negatively affect the heart, lungs, skin, and other vital organs, this treatment only impacts the tumor bed. It is the right treatment for all patients, but especially older patients who may need to consider certain comorbidities that increase with age.”
The current average life expectancy for women in the United States is over 81-years-old. For decades following retirement, they are living longer, healthier lives, trading pinochle for pickleball, and crosswords for CrossFit. The NCCN now advises those treating older adults to define them “based on functional status rather than chronologic age… Advanced age alone should not be the only criterion to preclude effective treatment that could improve quality of life or lead to survival benefit in older patients.”
“More and more women are living long enough to develop breast cancer, and long enough to outlive recurrence,” said Ley. “These women are vital to their communities and enthusiastically enjoying the best years of their lives. They want to be hiking and seeing their grandchildren – not sacrificing a month-and-a-half of their lives chained to an outpatient radiation center. It is the medical community’s responsibility to provide an option that not only allows seniors to eradicate their disease, but to do it quickly and graciously, impacting the cancer the most while impacting their lives the least.”
For many women, turning 65 or 70 also does not necessarily mean hanging up their business attire. “More and more women are foregoing traditional retirement to continue making a statement in their chosen fields,” adds Ley. “They have so much more to contribute to their industries, despite the age listed on their driver licenses. This procedure allows them to quickly and effectively eradicate their breast cancer without the interruption and adverse reactions associated with up to 30 additional whole breast radiation treatments.”
To learn more about this treatment, please call (01) 933-6132.
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