A new scientific team has found a new radiotherapy that reduces the duration of prostate cancer treatment from 8 weeks to 5 days.
Preliminary results from the study, published in the journal Lancet medical, showed that the experiment was "promising" to treat prostate cancer, and that the side effects were no worse than the current treatment.
Conventional radiotherapy is given to patients for more than 39 days, requiring men to go to the hospital on weekdays for about two months.
But doctors conducted an experiment that provides far stronger radiation than conventional radiation, targeting cancer tumors more accurately in just five sessions.
The trial was conducted on 847 men with prostate cancer by experts at the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Cancer Research Institute in London. About half of the men who received the current radiation therapy received 39 doses of the drug over a period of 8 weeks, or 20 doses over four weeks, while the others received 5 doses of high-strength radiation called SBRT, over a week or two weeks.
Scientists are now monitoring men for five years to see if a five-day treatment cycle is as effective in overcoming prostate cancer as longer treatment.