Breast cancer remains the most common cancer to target women in Australia (1). Adjuvant radiotherapy (RT) has become the mainstay treatment after breast conserving surgery for invasive cancer and post-mastectomy radiotherapy, boasting a reduction of local recurrence from 26% to 7% at 5 years follow-up. As with any treatment, radiation therapy has its side-effects – multiple studies have linked left breast irradiation to increased cardiac mortality and morbidity (2–4). Darby et al. found that the relative risk for ischaemic heart disease increased by 7.4% for...

Selection criteria involved women who were 70 years old or less, of performance status 0 or 1, with left sided breast cancer. Patients with poor function were excluded. They had to be fluent in English, had no hearing impairments and must be able to fit through the planning CT scan (size dependent). 20 patients in total were selected, 10 assigned to ABC and 10 assigned to VBH. Of the ABC cohort patients were able to receive adjuvant left breast or chest wall irradiation, and where...

The Shapiro-Wilk test of normality is summarised in Tables 1 and 2. This indicates that a substantial number of variables listed in Table 1 and 2 cannot be assumed to be from a normally distributed population (as the p-value of the Shapiro-Wilk statistic is less than .001). Therefore, subsequently, non-parametric statistics (i.e. Medians and Inter-quartile range) and techniques (e.g. Mann-Whitney U test) have been used to address the aims of the data analysis. The Wilcoxon signed-rank test was used to compare the median values of...

In our study consisting of 20 patients undergoing left sided breast cancer radiotherapy we showed that DIBH was a superior means of administering radiotherapy than free breathing. This is consistent with the literature already present. The treatment fields can be seen in Figures 5-8 demonstrating a reduced dose to organs-at-risk. In addition to this we demonstrated that ABC (using Elekta equipment) was a superior breath hold technique when compared to VBH. Statistically significant reductions were in Heart (Gy) and Contralateral Breast V3 (%). Further studies...

Dr. Amaran Parasuramar MBBS Royal Adelaide Hospital Associate Professor Martin Borg Consultant Radiation Oncologist Royal Adelaide Hospital Adelaide Radiotherapy Centre, Genesis Care Amy DeSmit Radiotherapist Adelaide Radiotherapy Centre, Genesis Care

1. AIHW&AACR. Cancer in Australia: an overview, 2012. Cancer Ser no74. 2012;Cat. no. C:Canberra: AIHW. 2. Group. EBCTC. Effects of radiotherapy and surgery in early breast cancer. An overview of the randomized trials. Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group. N Engl J Med [Internet]. 1995;333(22):1444–55. Available from: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7477144 3. Darby SC, McGale P, Taylor CW, Peto R. Long-term mortality from heart disease and lung cancer after radiotherapy for early breast cancer: prospective cohort study of about 300,000 women in US SEER cancer registries. Lancet Oncol...