Watch these interviews on the iPad edition of this issue conducted by Sarah Maxwell
Key Themes of the Meeting
ESTRO President Philip Poortmans, MD, PhD, Head of the Department of Radiation Oncology at Radboud University Medical Center in The Netherlands, discusses the key themes of this year's meeting: multidisciplinary collaboration and brachytherapy.
Brachytherapy Improves Survival for Inoperable Early-Stage Endometrial Cancer
Sahaja Acharya, MD, resident physician at Washington University in Saint Louis, who won the ESTRO 2015 Best Junior Presentation Award for her study (Abstract: OC-0277), talks about the use of brachytherapy with or without external-beam radiation, which extended survival in patients with early-stage, inoperable endometrial cancer. The population-based analysis looked at data from the National Cancer Institute's Surveillance, Epidemiology and End Results database, and she and her coauthors concluded that brachytherapy should now be considered as part of the treatment regimen for all patients with stage I inoperable endometrial cancer undergoing radiation.
Low-Dose-Rate Prostate Brachytherapy Doubles Cancer-Free Survival
William James Morris, MD, Clinical Professor in the Division of Radiation Oncology and Developmental Radiotherapeutics at the University of British Columbia, Director of GU Radiation Oncology at Vancouver Medical Centre, and Chair of the Provincial Prostate Brachytherapy Quality Assurance Committee, discusses the ASCENDE-RT study, which found that men with intermediate- or high-risk prostate cancer treated with low-dose-rate prostate brachytherapy were twice as likely to be cancer-free at five years compared with those given dose-escalated external-beam radiation therapy (Abstract: OC-0485). The multicenter randomized controlled study is the first and so far only study to compare the two techniques.
Combined Intracavitary/Interstitial Brachytherapy Called New Benchmark for Cervical Cancer
Lars Fokdal, MD, PhD, Consultant in the Department of Oncology at Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark, discusses why he and his co-researchers now believe that for patients with locally advanced cervical cancer, combining intracavitary and interstitial (IC/IS) brachytherapy techniques should be the benchmark treatment. The team's retroEMBRACE study of 700 patients showed that advanced adaptation with combined IC/IS delivered significantly higher radiation doses to the tumor without increasing exposure to organs or adding more late morbidity (Abstract OC-0105).
No Benefit for Pelvic Radiotherapy in High-Risk Localized Prostate Cancer
Pierre Blanchard, MD, PhD, of Institute Gustave-Roussy in France, discusses the Phase III GETUG 12 study, which found no improvement in biochemical progression-free survival among patients with high-risk localized prostate cancers treated with elective pelvic nodal irradiation compared with those who had prostate radiation only (Abstract: PD-0046).
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