• 1/22/2007
  • Rancho Mirage, CA
  • Health News Editor
  • earthtimes.org

Patients with head and neck cancer given both chemotherapy and radiation therapy may result in many avoiding additional surgery, says a U.S. study.

“Our goal is to cure the cancer as effectively as we can while using as few treatments as possible,” said lead author Dr. Ramesh Rengan of the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. This study is so exciting because it demonstrates that giving patients with head and neck cancer a non-invasive regimen of cisplatin-based chemotherapy and radiation therapy effectively treats many advanced head and neck cancers, meaning some patients can safely avoid an invasive surgery.The study, performed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, instead focused on treating the patients with chemotherapy and radiation and then measuring the patients’ response to the therapy to see if they still needed the follow-up neck surgery.

Eighty percent of the patients with advanced head and neck cancer who participated in this study had a complete response to chemoradiation alone with elimination of any detectable disease in the neck, according to the study performed at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

The findings were presented at the Multidisciplinary Head and Neck Cancer Symposium in Rancho Mirage, Calif.