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Journal of the National Cancer Institute Advance Access originally published online on June 17, 2009
JNCI Journal of the National Cancer Institute 2009 101(13):904-905; doi:10.1093/jnci/djp164
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Published by Oxford University Press 2009.

EDITORIALS

Late Effects From Radiation Therapy: The Hits Just Keep on Coming

Dan L. Longo

Affiliation of author: National Institute on Aging, Baltimore, MD

Correspondence to: Dan L. Longo, MD, National Institute on Aging, 251 Bayview Blvd, Ste 100, Rm 04C224, Baltimore, MD 21224-6825 (e-mail: longod@grc.nia.nih.gov).

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

There can be little doubt by now that if radiation therapy use in Hodgkin's disease were a drug regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), it would have been taken off the market. Can you imagine the response to a drug company's argument? "Even though we don't have any long-term follow-up data, we are pretty sure that reducing the dose of the drug by one third is going to eliminate the late fatal and life-threatening side effects. We are giving the drug completely differently these days. Trust us on this." It seems highly unlikely that such an argument would influence the FDA's decision making, doesn't it?

However, precisely that argument seems to be influencing the persistent use of radiation therapy plus chemotherapy in Hodgkin's disease when equally effective treatment that omits radiation therapy altogether, namely chemotherapy alone, is available. The practice defies logical . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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