Lung Cancer, Proton Beam Therapy

Proton beam therapy for lung cancer

I received a couple of questions about one of my slides on a previous post.

This is an early result from some work I’ve been doing with University College London Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust looking at how we can improve cure rates following radiotherapy for #lungcancer 

Here we’ve tried two different ways or reducing the radiation dose received by the heart. You’ll see that #protontherapy can significantly reduce the radiation dose received by the heart. If we put the amount that the dose can be reduced on to a risk prediction method from Robert Dess at the University of Michigan, you’ll see that the risk of a major cardiac event could be reduced to less than half in selected patients if they received proton beam therapy.

This is a treatment I can offer to private patients at Proton International London. We have some way to go before we can offer this treatment routinely to NHS England patients, but we’ll keep seeking out the evidence required to make this potentially life-saving treatment available to everyone. 

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About James Wilson

Dr James Wilson is a Consultant Clinical Oncologist at University College London Hospital and is an Honorary Associate Professor at UCL. He is a Member of the Royal College of Physicians, Fellow of the Royal College of Radiologists and Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine.