Adding chemotherapy improves survival in cervical cancer

Cervical cancer survival rates could increase by up to 50%if chemotherapy were added to standard treatment regimens, according to an announcement issued last week by the US National Cancer Institute.

The National Cancer Institute took the unusual step of a sending a clinical alert to 20000 oncologists after reviewing the preliminary results of five separate phase III studies. All of the studies showed that the addition of cisplatin based chemotherapy to radiation treatment improved survival rates for locally invasive cervical cancer by 30-50%The director of the institute, Dr Richard Klausner, said that the results of the five studies were remarkably consistent and that cumulatively the findings are “likely to change the standard of care for …