By Shalini K. Vinod, MBBS, MD Posted: October 2018 The standard of care for patients with inoperable stage III NSCLC is curative radiotherapy and concurrent chemotherapy.1 However, there are numerous factors that may preclude this approach, including poor respiratory function and large tumor volume—both of which are surrogates for unacceptable radiation doses to normal lung…

Posted: October 2018 Patients with stage III or more advanced lung cancer tend to be older and less healthy than patients with other stage III cancers. Because of this, selection of optimal therapies for individual patients, including stereotactic body radiation therapy (SBRT), is more nuanced. With the advent of improvements in technology, more multidisciplinary approaches…

By Leah Lawrence Posted: June 2018 The use of trimodality therapy—the combination of chemoradiotherapy followed by surgery—remains controversial for patients with locally advanced cN2-N3 NSCLC. According to the National Comprehensive Cancer Network guidelines, definitive chemoradiation therapy is the standard of care for the majority of patients with stage III NSCLC, and trimodality treatment is used…

By Pranshu Mohindra, MD, MBBS, DABR®, Lecia Sequist, MD, and Laurie E. Gaspar, MD, MBA Posted: December 2017 Since the initial approval of erlotinib, an oral tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI), for treatment of patients with previously treated locally advanced or metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), multiple additional treatment agents targeting EGFR mutation are now…

By Suresh Senan, MRCP, FRCR, PhD Posted: December 2017 Improved delivery of radiotherapy has contributed to the recent changes in guidelines for patients with lung cancer. The clinical impact of some technical advances has been modest, but the cumulative effect of many developments has led to more precise treatment delivery, and has increased the confidence…

By Cynthia L. Kryder, MS, CCC-Sp Posted: October 2017 For patients who present with inoperable, locally advanced lung cancer, photon-based chemoradiation remains the standard of care. Despite advanced radiation-delivery techniques, such as multi-leaf collimators, intensity-modulated radiotherapy (IMRT), and imageguided radiotherapy (IGRT), radiation oncologists continue to explore ways to extend the ALARA principle, that is, the…

By Prof. Corinne Faivre-Finn The optimal timing and schedule of thoracic radiation in the management of limited-stage small cell lung cancer (LS-SCLC) continues to provoke debate. Since the publication of Intergroup 0096 in 1999, there had been controversy about the standard chemo-radiotherapy (cCTRT) regimen in LS-SCLC.1 Although twice-daily (BD) radiotherapy (RT) was associated with a…