One-day Treatment with the Anticancer Drug Carboplatin is as Effective as Radiotherapy for Testicular Cancer

One-day treatment with the anticancer drug carboplatin is as
effective and less toxic than three weeks radiation therapy for a type
of testicular cancer, according to a report published in this week’s
issue of The Lancet.

For the last 50 years standard care for stage 1 seminoma - a cancer of the testes - has been surgical removal of the cancerous testicle (hemi-castration) followed by three weeks radiotherapy. However, patients treated in this way and followed up for up to 30 years have shown increased risk of cancer in another organ and heart disease that begins after 15 years.

Tim Oliver (St Bartholomew’s and The London School of Medicine, London, UK) and colleagues recruited 1477 patients with stage 1 seminoma from 70 hospitals in 14 countries to compare radiotherapy with chemotherapy treatment. Between 1996 and 2001, the researchers randomly assigned 543 patients with stage I seminoma to receive a single course of carboplatin and 904 patients to receive radiation therapy. After a median follow-up of 3 years, they found that relapse-free survival was similar between the two groups (95?4% for the carboplatin group vs 96?6% for radiation therapy). At 5 years they also found that patients receiving carboplatin were less likely to develop tumours in their remaining testicle.

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