One of the reasons why pancreatic cancer has a high mortality rate is that it produces very few symptoms in its early stages and by the time it is diagnosed, it has already spread. Dr Cellini added: "Even in developed countries, perhaps only a quarter of patients are picked up early enough to have their tumours surgically removed. Although their survival chances are better, the majority still do not survive beyond a few years."
For patients with early stage tumours, standard treatment is surgery followed by chemotherapy, sometimes with radiotherapy. For later-stage disease, patients are treated with chemotherapy, which may be combined with palliative radiotherapy as their disease progresses.
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Dr Cellini said: "Radiotherapy has benefitted from a number of technological improvements over recent years and it is becoming easier to give higher doses that are targeted to the tumour area. This study suggests radiotherapy should be considered for patients with early stage pancreatic cancer. It may also be worthwhile to investigate whether current radiotherapy techniques could also bring survival benefits to patients with more advanced tumours."
Dr Cellini is now working with colleagues under the supervision of Professor Alessio Morganti (leader of the presented research) on a study using high-dose radiotherapy, combined with chemotherapy to treat pancreatic cancer patients ahead of surgery.
President of ESTRO, Professor Yolande Lievens, head of the department of radiation oncology at Ghent University Hospital, Belgium, said: "This is an interesting study which raises questions about the role that radiotherapy could play in extending the lives of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. In this grim disease, radiotherapy has not been shown to have an impact on survival, but the current study suggests the doses previously tested may have been too low to do so. Radiotherapy has evolved and improved considerably over recent years, allowing us to deliver higher doses without increasing side effects, and, for a cancer with such poor survival rates, all promising new options should be explored."
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