Men with prostate cancer could be cured in ONE WEEK

Patients with prostate cancer could be cured in just a week instead of a month with targeted sessions of high-dose radiation therapy.

Doctors at London Royal Marsden Hospital are due to treat the first patient this week in a trial to determine whether it is safe to give radiation therapy in two large doses instead of many smaller doses.

Earlier this month, researchers from the NHS Foundation Trust and the hospital’s Institute of Cancer Research found that the typical amount of radiation to treat prostate cancer – delivered in small doses over about 20 sessions per months – could be safely administered in just five large doses in just one or two weeks.

Trial leader and consultant clinical oncologist at the Royal Marsden and the Institute of Cancer Research, London (ICR), Dr Alison Tree, told The Times that working-age men could “come in, be healed, continue their normal life and completely forget about their cancer ”.

There are nearly 50,000 diagnoses of prostate cancer each year, making it the most common form of cancer in British men.

Reducing the number of sessions needed to treat cancer from 20 to just two would save the NHS millions of pounds and allow radiation therapy units to treat more patients.

Dr Tree said: “When I started training 15 years ago we were doing very basic radiation therapy, where you were treating large square areas of the body.

“Of course, cancer is never square – and that meant you would want to [irradiate] accidentally a lot of healthy tissue because it was the best we could do.

“We’re so much more precise that we don’t touch a lot of healthy tissue now.”

She previously said the new technique had shown “very promising results” with few side effects, adding: “Our goal was to understand whether we could safely increase the dose of targeted radiation per day, allowing us to reduce the number of treatments required.

One option for patients is surgery to remove the prostate, but many men suffer from erectile dysfunction and urinary incontinence.

Another treatment is radiation therapy, which involves exploding the prostate with beams of x-rays that can destroy tumor cells, but there are trade-offs.

Radiation can affect the intestine and rectum, which are located next to the prostate, damaging the nerves and muscles that control when men use the toilet. This can cause bowel incontinence.

To reduce the severity of side effects, NHS guidelines recommend that radiation therapy be divided into at least 20 doses, while many doctors choose to expand it to 32 even smaller doses.

But that could soon be reduced to just five trips in just seven days if the new technique, called stereotaxic body radiation therapy, is adopted. It allows clinicians to target tumors with “submillimeter” precision.

Because it is so precise, much higher doses of radiation can be administered without fear that it will damage surrounding organs as well.

The results of a two-year global study of stereotaxic body radiation therapy found that 99 percent of patients who underwent the high-intensity treatment had no serious side effects, while 90 percent only experienced severe side effects. minor symptoms, such as problems urinating.

Nearly 900 patients have been recruited for the trial, funded by The Royal Marsden Cancer Charity.

Half were treated with the new technique while the rest received standard radiation therapy.

Importantly, the new treatment was found to be equally effective in destroying cancer cells and reducing the risk of disease recurrence – nine out of ten patients in both arms of the trial whose cancer was classified as intermediate or lower risk. did not require additional treatment.

Dr Tree said: “I think there is a good argument for adopting it in the NHS.”