Article Text
Statistics from Altmetric.com
- Breast cancer
- lumpectom
- intraoperative radiotherapy
- TARGIT
- IORT
- partial breast irradiation (PBI)
- targeted radiotherapy
- patient benefit
Commentary on: Coles CE, Griffin CL, Kirby AM, et al. IMPORT Trialists. Partial-breast radiotherapy after breast conservation surgery for patients with early breast cancer (UK IMPORT LOW trial): 5-year results from a multicentre, randomised, controlled, phase 3, non-inferiority trial. Lancet 2017;390:1048–60.
Context
The evidence-based local treatment for early breast cancer is breast-conserving surgery and radiotherapy, requiring 3–6 weeks of daily whole breast external beam radiation therapy, which is inconvenient for patients and expensive.
The suggestion that targeted radiation to the tumour bed with modern techniques may be adequate was proposed in 1995.1 This was heralded as a new standard2 with the publication of the TARGIT-A trial3 4 of single-dose targeted intraoperative radiotherapy (TARGIT-IORT), later confirmed by other European studies using brachytherapy5 that requires 5 days of inpatient stay or EBRT.6
Methods
In this study,7 in 30 UK centres, from 2007 …
Footnotes
Contributors JSV wrote the initial draft. JST and FW made contributions to the draft. All authors approved the final manuscript.
Competing interests Carl Zeiss has sponsored some travel to some conferences and has paid some honoraria.
Provenance and peer review Commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Request Permissions
If you wish to reuse any or all of this article please use the link below which will take you to the Copyright Clearance Center’s RightsLink service. You will be able to get a quick price and instant permission to reuse the content in many different ways.