Breast cancer is a major health problem for women all over the world. In recent years, about half of the cases detected in Japan were below stage I. The standard care for early-stage breast cancer is breast-conserving therapy, which consists of conservative surgery and fractionated whole breast irradiation. Breast surgery followed by more than 5 weeks of radio-therapy causing adverse skin reactions is still a burden to patients. Accelerated partial breast irradiation (APBI) is an alternative to whole breast irradiation in patients with low-risk tumor, based on four randomized trials and more than 40 prospective trials. In this sense, carbon-ion radiotherapy (C-ion RT) is suitable as an effective local therapy and could be even more effective than standard radical radiotherapy. Our institute started a clinical trial of radical C-ion RT for patients with low-risk T1N0M0 invasive ductal carcinoma in 2013. The idea was to develop a short-course C-ion RT to be finished in 1 week, which we believe could replace surgery and more than 5 weeks of radiotherapy. Furthermore, it is assumed that C-ion RT may play a role in preventing regional lymph node recurrence and solitary distant metastasis.
CITATION STYLE
Karasawa, K. (2014). Breast cancer. In Carbon-Ion Radiotherapy: Principles, Practices, and Treatment Planning (pp. 303–307). Springer Japan. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-54457-9_35
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