Radiation Therapy versus
Chemotherapy
Recently a study was released that looked at the pros and cons of using Chemotherapy instead of radiation therapy for some types of cancer (in my case stage I seminoma Testicular Cancer) where radiation is seen as the "best practice" currently. There are several reasons for this:
- Radiation Therapy can sometimes cause cancer unrelated to the cancer that it is killing. This is basically what happened to Marie Curie.
- Usually the cancer caused by Radiation Therapy has a higher mortality rate than the kind of cancer that it killed.
- Even if a relapse occurs, it is usually the same kind of cancer and is just as easily cured.
- Chemotherapy, although more intense in the short term, does not have any well documented long term side effects.
At this point only the abstract of the paper that discusses the pros and cons is out but for Testicular Cancer, chances of recurance with no radiation and not chemo are about 20%, with radiation, 2-3% and with chemo, 4-5%. The cances of developing another type of cancer later with radiation are about 2-3%. There are no known long term effects of chemo (at least in the case of the silver bullet drug for testicular named carbo-platin) but more data needs to be accumulated (which basically means that more time needs to pass so that we can see what happens to the folks who chose chemo later in life.)
My doctor at Kaiser Permanente gave me the choice after explaining the current state of things and I chose chemo so hopefully I won't be a statistic.
Source: American Society for Clinical Ontology. "A randomised comparison of single agent carboplatin with radiotherapy in the adjuvant treatment of stage I seminoma of the testis, following orchidectomy" 5/29/2005: http://asco.org/ac/1,1003,_12-002636-00_18-0026-00_19-00898,00.asp