Circulate this.

A new way to survey early stage lung cancer. While local control with SBRT is pretty great, it can be tough to know what to do with evolving post-treatment parenchymal changes. This uncertainty can lead to a lot of additional testing and worry, but circulating tumor cells (CTC) are here to help. In this prospective study, 42% of patients treated with lung SBRT for early stage lung cancer had detectable CTC prior to treatment. Among patients who had undetectable CTC after SBRT, there were no disease recurrences. On the other hand, 3 of 3 patients with disease progression had detectable CTC after SBRT, which often predated clinical disease failure by many months. TBL: The presence or absence of circulating tumor cells during surveillance after lung SBRT may help identify patients at both low and high risk of disease progression. | Frick, Int J Radiat Oncol Biol Phys 2018