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Would you give palliative breast RT to a patient receiving weekly paclitaxel for rapidly progressing metastatic disease?

If a patient has a painful breast lesion in the setting of rapidly progressing systemic disease treated with weekly taxol (60 mg/m2), would you feel comfortable giving RT while she is on this regimen? If so, how would you choose to treat her breast mass?
3 Answers
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Radiation Oncology · Allegheny Health Network, Pittsburgh
Answered on

Given symptomatic disease and need for palliation, I would treat. I would offer 30 Gy/10 fractions. If localized lesion, I would target this with mini-tangents, limiting dose to lung, given concurrent paclitaxel. If involving skin, I would bolus daily.

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Radiation Oncology · University of North Carolina Chapel Hill School of Medicine
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We would also feel comfortable using palliative RT since it can provide meaningful palliation. While the dose of taxol described is slightly higher than what we use during concurrent chemo/RT for lung cancer, the irradiated lung volumes will be far smaller in this setting, so we suspect this would b...

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Radiation Oncology · Karmanos Cancer Institute - McLaren Proton Therapy Center
Answered on

In addition to the 30 Gy in 10 fractions, I would start with a GRID boost of 15 Gy x 1 using the MLC-based approach described in the literature for bulky breast cancer as published in 2012 by Neuner et al., PMID 21531514.

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