Background:Radiation therapy is an important part of the multimodal management of breast cancer, including early stage, locally progressed, and metastatic cases.
Objectives: this work aims to compare a 2-year locoregional disease control between 1-week and 3-weeks course adjuvant radiotherapy in high-risk breast cancer patients, and to compare disease-free survival (DFS), overall survival, and radiation-related adverse events, both early and late events.
Methods:This study was carried out on 160 female patients 45 years of age or older, who had Oncoplastic Breast Surgery or total mastectomy with adequate axillary clearance and a negative margin, breast carcinomas that is invasive (TXN1-3M0, T0N2-3 M0, T1N2- 3M0, T2N2-3M0, T3N0-3M0, T4N0-3M0). Patients were divided in to two groups: patients were assigned to the 40 Gy over 3 weeks schedule and patients to the 26 Gy over 1 week schedule.
Results: There were significant differences between both groups regarding all postoperative data with P value < 0.05 except post operative pathology. one week radiation in advanced breast cancer patients were efficient in locoregional control and disease-free survival that was comparable with moderate hypofractionation. DFS for all studied population after 24 months were 91.91%. DFS in one week arm were 92.88% but in control arm DFS were 90.85%. There was a statistically significant difference regarding radiation dermatitis P value 0.0001.
Conclusions: One week radiation therapy (26 GY/5 fractions/1 week) can save time, effort, overload in radiotherapy machines, improve our patient compliance with efficient disease control.