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Commentary
General medicine
Trial supports targeted radiotherapy for early breast cancer but protocol still requires 3 weeks of daily therapy
  1. Jayant S Vaidya1,
  2. Frederik Wenz2,
  3. Jeffrey S Tobias3
  1. 1 Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London, London
  2. 2 Department of Radiation Oncology, University of Heidelberg, Mannheim, Germany
  3. 3 Department of Clinical Oncology, University College London, London, UK
  1. Correspondence to Professor Jayant S Vaidya, Division of Surgery and Interventional Science, University College London, London W1W 7JN, UK; jayant.vaidya{at}ucl.ac.uk

https://doi.org/10.1136/ebmed-2017-110849

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    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 …

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    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.