Patients preparing for pancreatic cancer surgery kept better physical function and reported less fatigue when they received five sessions of focused radiation instead of 28 sessions of radiation with chemotherapy, according to a randomized trial presented Sept. 28 at the American Society for Radiation Oncology annual meeting in Boston.
Survival told a more cautious story. Patients in the short-course group had lower median survival figures, although the differences were not statistically significant and the trial was too small to answer that question. For patients and families weighing treatment, both findings belong in the same conversation.
