Patients with small cell lung cancer that had spread to the brain lived a median of 17.4 months after focused radiosurgery, compared with 8.6 months after a form of whole-brain radiation, in a phase 3 trial presented Sept. 28 at the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO) Annual Meeting.
The finding comes with a major caveat. Survival was a secondary goal of the study, and the trial was not designed to prove a survival benefit. Its main question was whether radiosurgery better protected memory and thinking, and on that measure the two treatments showed no significant difference.
