BEIJING, Jan. 24 -- Low-dose radiation intended merely for pain relief may help a few patients with seemingly incurable advanced lung cancer beat the odds, Australian researchers said Monday.

 

Lung cancer is by far the biggest cancer killer globally.

   The researchers studied 2,337 patients who got palliative radiation for advanced cases of non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), the most common type of lung cancer. Such advanced cases are typically considered "incurable," with "dismal" odds of survival, the researchers report.

    Writing in the journal Cancer, they said 1.1 percent of the patients lived five or more years after treatment.

    "About one in every hundred patients with non-small cell lung cancer appear to have disease that is remarkably sensitive to treatment with radiotherapy," said Dr. Michael Mac Manus, an associate professor in the department of Radiation Oncology at the Peter MacCallum Cancer Center in East Melbourne. "Some of these patients seem actually to have been cured by a therapy usually considered to have no curative potential whatsoever."

    "If we could understand why some patients can apparently be cured by non-aggressive therapies, we might be able to develop treatments that could benefit all lung cancer patients," he said.

    NSCLC has an average five-year survival rate of only 40 percent. The five-year survival rate in advanced disease is reduced to only about 15 percent.

    Patients diagnosed with NSCLC that is too advanced to be cured can be given palliative therapies to ease pain and discomfort, including radiation.

    Lung cancer is by far the biggest cancer killer globally. Each year ten million people are diagnosed with lung cancer, and half of all patients die within a year of diagnosis. Enditem

    (Agencies)