MEDICAL WATCH : Good News on Cancer

There is reassuring news for the thousands of women who caught their breast cancer in the early stages and decided to undergo the less disfiguring lumpectomy instead of a mastectomy, a full breast removal. Three studies in the latest edition of the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that a lumpectomy--removal of the tumor and minimal adjacent tissues--followed by radiation therapy is as effective as a mastectomy.

The validity of the less radical procedure was at the center of a controversy that developed last year when it was disclosed that half a dozen falsified cases from a Montreal hospital were used in an international, two-decade-long study. That study supported the effectiveness of lumpectomies.

The National Cancer Institute, which funded the study, insisted that the compromised data did not undermine the findings. But women were worried and angry, and the incident was a blow to public trust in medical research.

The findings published this week confirm the conclusions of the NCI study. A new analysis of the original 2,100 patients who participated in the experiment comparing mastectomies with lumpectomies found that women who underwent lumpectomies and radiation therapy lived as long as those who underwent total mastectomies.

After lung cancer, breast cancer is the most deadly disease that afflicts women. It’s a relief to millions of breast cancer patients around the world and their physicians to know that a less radical treatment is indeed as safe and effective as earlier reports suggested.