Breast cancer irradiation: optimisation of treatment techniques and evaluation of toxicity

Summary

Radiotherapy plays an important role in the treatment of breast cancer patients as it has shown to improve both local control and survival.¹ To further improve the therapeutic ratio, it is important to optimise radiotherapy dose distributions using modern radiotherapy techniques. This is particularly true when the locoregional lymph nodes are included in the target volume, as the resulting complex target volume, in close proximity of the heart and lungs, makes treatment planning more challenging.² With improving survival rates for breast cancer patients, prevention of long-term treatment-related toxicity becomes more important. Therefore, a better understanding of the occurrence of radiotherapy-induced late cardiopulmonary side-effects is needed.

(BELG J MED ONCOL 2013;7(4):123–6)