A new treatment for cervical cancer It has been hailed by professionals as the greatest advance in the last 25 years, since it reduces the risk of death from this disease by 40%. Cervical cancer is the fourth most common type of cancer among women worldwide, with nearly 660,000 new cases and 350,000 deaths annually, according to data from the World Health Organization (WHO).
This new therapeutic approach has been tested in an international clinical trial that lasted a decade and included patients from five countries: the United Kingdom, Mexico, India, Italy and Brazil. Treatment consists of a brief chemotherapy cycle before patients undergo chemoradiation, which is the standard treatment for cervical cancer, consisting of a combination of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.
The results of the clinical trial, published in ‘The Lancet’, show that this regimen reduces therisk of death by 40% and the risk of cancer recurrence by 35% over a period of at least five years.
Study details
The clinical trial, known as Interlace, was funded by Cancer Research UK and the UCL Cancer Trials Center and led by researchers at University College London (UCL). The objective was to evaluate whether a short course of chemotherapy Before chemoradiation could reduce the rate of relapses and deaths in patients with locally advanced cervical cancer, that is, cancer that has not spread to other organs.
The study included 500 womenwhich were divided into two groups. One group received a six-week course of chemotherapy with the drugs carboplatin and paclitaxel, followed by the standard treatment of chemoradiation with cisplatin and brachytherapy. The control group, for its part, only received standard chemoradiation.
The results were remarkable: after five years, 80% of the women who received the additional chemotherapy were still alive, and in 72% of the cases cancerit had not returned nor had it spread. In the group that only received standard treatment, 72% of patients were still alive and 64% had not experienced a recurrence or spread of cancer.
Furthermore, the researchers report that the new treatment not only significantly reduced the mortality rate, but also improves quality of life of patients, as it is a well-tolerated regimen that allows women to return to their daily activities more quickly than other longer or more aggressive treatments.
An advance that could save many lives
The Dra. Mary McCormackprincipal investigator of the trial, described the new regimen as the most significant advance in the treatment of cervical cancer since the adoption of chemoradiation in 1999. “Every improvement in a cancer patient’s survival is importantespecially when the treatment is well tolerated and administered for a relatively short time,” he comments.
Dr Iain Foulkes, executive director of research and innovation at Cancer Research UK, has praised the results, saying that simply adding a course of induction chemotherapy before chemoradiation “has given remarkable results.” It also highlights that this approach is feasible for global implementation, since it uses drugs that are already approved and available in most countries.
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