Contact: Ellen Bank
843.792.2626
May 21, 2002
CHARLESTON, SC -- Physicians at the Medical
UniversityÕs Hollings Cancer Center will be among the first 30
institutions in the country to treat a breast cancer patient with
radiation administered through a balloon catheter directly to the
surgical site where the cancerous lump was removed. The therapy
minimizes radiation exposure to healthy tissue, and the course of
treatment is five days as opposed to six to seven weeks with the
standard treatment method.
The process uses a new medical device, the MammoSite Radiation
Therapy System (RTS), which received U.S. Food and Drug Administration
clearance on May 6 of this year.
Yesterday, MUSC surgeons David Cole, M.D., and William
Gillanders, M.D., removed cancerous tissue from 25-year-old Jessica
Durham of Smoaks. The two surgeons, with the assistance of Joseph M.
Jenrette III, M.D., radiation oncologist, implanted the RTS, an
inflatable balloon attached to a hollow catheter, at the site where the
lump was removed. They inflated the balloon with saline solution and
contrast media so the balloon could be imaged. Later this week, Jenrette
will administer radiation through the catheter directly into the
inflated balloon. This is accomplished with a brachytherapy machine
which sends a pellet of radiation directly to the center of the balloon,
delivering a prescribed level of radiation to the tissue surrounding the
original tumor. The pellet is left in for five minutes and then
removed.
Jenrette will treat Durham in this manner on an out-patient
basis twice a day for five days. Each treatment lasts five minutes. It
is an alternative to external beam radiation where the entire breast is
irradiated. "With the new brachytherapy application, the radiation is
mostly confined to the cavity where the cancer generally would come
back," said Jenrette. "The surrounding healthy breast tissue is
spared radiation damage, usually redness of entire breast and in some
cases, radiation burns."
Candidates for the new treatment are usually women whose cancer
is caught in early stages whose tumors are under two and half
centimeters and not too close to the skin or the chest wall. It offers
an alternative to women considering the breast conserving lumpectomy
which requires follow-up radiation treatment. Although breast
conservation therapy allows a woman to save her breast, 50 percent of
patients with early stage breast cancer still choose to have a
mastectomy, despite comparable long-term recurrence and survival rates.
With this new radiation therapy option, more women are likely to
consider the lumpectomy treatment, particularly women living a distance
from a radiation therapy center.
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