January 4, 2002	Friday	Shawwal 19, 1422

CHICAGO, Jan 3: Handyman Mort Levy said he hadn’t been sick a day in his life until he was diagnosed with prostate cancer.

Levy left his California home two years ago to undergo 10 weeks of intense state-of-the-art radiation therapy at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, one of a handful of hospitals then offering the treatment.

Levy’s tumour was successfully destroyed and he has since returned to work.

“I did a lot of research,” said Levy, 72. “I didn’t like my other options. I didn’t want surgery and I didn’t want local radiation — there are too many complications, like incontinence.”

The increasingly popular treatment Levy received, called intensity modulated radiation therapy (IMRT), uses digital technology and computer-generated images to aim powerful radiation beams at tumours and avoid damaging healthy organs and tissue nearby.

Because the radiation beams are more precise, doctors can deliver more cancer-killing energy than with conventional radiation and patients suffer fewer and less severe side effects such as hair loss, dry mouth due to gland damage, or rectal problems.

Studies on prostate cancer patients have shown that delivering higher doses of radiation improves the cure rate and reduces complications.

A growing number of US hospitals, almost four dozen in 23 states, are equipping themselves to provide IMRT, which requires costly specialized training.

The treatment option will gain adherents with higher government health insurance reimbursement rates that go into effect in early 2002, according to Varian Medical Systems Inc., the world’s largest maker of radiation equipment.

“Our goal is to have 180 or 200 hospitals offering this (technology) a year from now,” Varian president and chief executive Richard Levy said. Levy is no relation to patient Mort Levy.

CANCER ON THE RISE: The incidence of cancer of all kinds is rising about three per cent a year in the United States as the population ages. The American Cancer Society has estimated that 1.2 million new US cancer cases are diagnosed each year.

US cancer treatment outlays total about 60 billion dollars annually, with 1.4 billion dollars of that spent on radiation therapy. The balance mostly is spent on drugs for chemotherapy and on surgical procedures.

IMRT, which has mostly been used to treat prostate and head and neck cancers, is increasingly being employed against breast and lung cancers thanks to the enhancements that allow radioactive beams to hit moving targets as the patient breathes.

“Respiratory gating (the tracking technology) tackles a problem we’ve had with radiotherapy since it’s inception. The tumour moves as the patient breathes, especially a tumour in the abdomen and lungs,” said Richard Emory, chief medical physicist at Saint Vincent’s Comprehensive Cancer Center in New York.

“The radiation beams have been fixed and we have not been able to compensate for that until now,” he said.—Reuters