Shorter courses of radiation therapy may be in order for women with early-stage breast cancer. And the largest study to test this suggests the abbreviated treatment time in no way affects risk of recurrence.

Often, the greatest hassle of radiation is getting to and from appointments, every weekday, for many weeks. With less frequent visits, life could get a whole lot easier.

Dr. John Dewar of the University of Dundee in Scotland led a two-part study of nearly 4,500 women in the United Kingdom to test courses of radiation and found five years later that cancer recurrences were low -- about two to five percent -- for women who received both longer and shorter durations of therapy. There were so few recurrences -- 158 -- that doctors believe the treatments are equivalent. They just can't say this with certainty yet.

This is great news for patients traveling great distances to their treatment facilities. Other benefits of shorter radiation timelines are less swelling and shrinkage of breast tissue and less enlargement of blood vessels.

When I received radiation after my lumpectomy I had to go every weekday for around six weeks. That was five years ago. These days researchers are talking about a new way to receive radiation treatments that are much shorter in duration.

Partial breast irradiation is a new option available to women but is still in the experimental stages. The new technique gives radiation only to the area of the breast where the cancer was removed. It would be given twice a day over a period of five days. A catheter, a small, flexible tube used to deliver the radiation treatment, may be in for a total of seven to ten days.

Whole breast radiation is now the standard of care and is given to the entire breast and not just the area where the cancer was removed. Past studies have show this method to be effective in keeping breast cancer from returning after a lumpectomy.

If you are interested in learning more about partial breast radiation, speak with your physician about participating in a clinical trial.

The Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, UK, researchers completed a study showing that more intense radiation treatments given over a shorter period of time were just as effective as the traditional treatments currently recommended. The side effects from radiation treatment did not seem to be any worse with the more intense treatments. This will save the number of times a woman being treated for breast cancer needs to go in for treatment, and will save on healthcare costs. UK and US researchers, conducted the ten-year trial of 13 larger doses and found that the fewer, larger doses were just as effective as the 25 doses. The study involved 1,410 women who underwent radiotherapy after surgery.