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CNN Live Today
New Follow-up Treatment Available for Breast Cancer Patients
Aired May 07, 2002 - 10:42 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
DARYN KAGAN, CNN ANCHOR: Some very important health news to share with you this morning. More than 200,000 women will be diagnosed with breast cancer this year. And for those who choose to have the cancerous lump removed, a new and quicker option is available for follow-up treatment. Our medical correspondent, Rhonda Rowland has the story.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
RHONDA ROWLAND, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): Mary Stoddard has breast cancer. So does Dolores Dean Lauren. And each has had a lumpectomy, surgery to remove just the cancerous lump. From there, they made very different choices. Stoddard chose conventional radiation therapy. This is day 16.
MARY STODDARD, BREAST CANCER PATIENT: All the troops -- good morning.
ROWLAND: Every day for six weeks, she'll drive the 20 miles each way to have a large machine beam radiation to the outside of her breast.
STODDARD: I'm so confident in what's being done for me. It's small -- it's a small price to pay.
ROWLAND: Lauren also got radiation therapy, but it took just five days.
DOLORES DEAN LAUREN, BREAST CANCER PATIENT: I'm a very active person, and truthfully, I wanted to get it over with as fast as possible.
ROWLAND: Lauren's faster type of radiation is called brachytherapy. Here's how it works. Rather than bombarding the body with radiation from the outside, a catheter is inserted into the area where the tumor was removed. Then, a tiny radioactive seed delivers the dose of radiation.
DR. ROBERT KUSKE, UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSON CLINICAL CANCER CENTER: The radiation therapy given with brachytherapy is radiation from the inside out.
ROWLAND: Brachytherapy has been used for years to treat prostate cancer, and it has been successful. Dr. Kuske, who's studied brachytherapy in 260 women, says now that the FDA has approved a version that uses just one catheter -- it used to use several -- it could make a difference for the estimated one-third of women who fail to finish their radiation therapy because of logistics, or women who opt for a mastectomy, removal of the entire breast, because radiation is inconvenient.
But, wait...
DR. OTTIS BRAWLEY, EMORY UNIVERSITY CANCER CENTER: I really think that women need to understand that this has not been fully evaluated.
ROWLAND: No one knows yet if brachytherapy is as good as the gold-standard form of radiation.
BRAWLEY: My own personal opinions right now are that it is something that is incredibly -- sounds great, hasn't to me been totally proven to be effective.
ROWLAND: There is solid evidence that Stoddard's six weeks of radiation give her a 95 percent chance of living 10 more years. For Lauren, who got five days of radiation, the answer is not in yet.
Rhonda Rowland, CNN, Atlanta.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
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