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Brachytherapy in the treatment of breast cancer

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Abstract

Brachytherapy is an important radio-therapeutic modality for a variety of malignancies, including prostate cancer, cervix cancer, breast cancer, vagina cancer, endometrium cancer, head and neck cancer, and many more. This technique has been shown to be an effective and safe non-pharmaceutical treatment with fewer serious complications and better outcome than other treatments for breast cancer. Every year, hundreds of thousands of patients around the world benefit from brachytherapy, which reliably delivers a relatively higher radiation dose to the intended target. However, the follow-up time, patient eligibility criteria, treatment strategy, and radiation doses used in published studies are somewhat inconsistent, making it difficult to strictly compare and evaluate the performance of the treatment. More rigorous studies are required to confirm the safety of this technique and to make outcome data more comparable. In this review, we focus on recent advances in breast brachytherapy techniques and provide an overview of outcomes, cosmetic outcome, toxicity, complications, and limitations of brachytherapy for the treatment of breast cancer. We also summarize the clinical outcomes and toxicity results in patients receiving or not receiving brachytherapy.

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Funding

This study was supported by the Program of Hebei Administration of Traditional Chinese Medicine (2013031).

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Author notes

  1. Xinna Deng and Haijiang Wu have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Oncology & Immunotherapy, Hebei General Hospital, Shijiazhuang, China

    Xinna Deng, Fei Gao, Qingxia Li, Shuzhen Liu & Jianhui Cai

  2. Department of Pathology, Hebei Medical University, Shijiazhuang, China

    Haijiang Wu

  3. Mathew Mailing Centre for Translational Transplantation Studies, Lawson Health Research Institute, London Health Sciences Centre, London, ON, Canada

    Ye Su

  4. Department of Medicine, and Pathology, University of Western Ontario, London, ON, Canada

    Ye Su

Authors
  1. Xinna Deng
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  2. Haijiang Wu
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  3. Fei Gao
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  4. Ye Su
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  5. Qingxia Li
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  6. Shuzhen Liu
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  7. Jianhui Cai
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Correspondence to Jianhui Cai.

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Deng, X., Wu, H., Gao, F. et al. Brachytherapy in the treatment of breast cancer. Int J Clin Oncol 22, 641–650 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10147-017-1155-5

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