Racewalk.

Rather than moseying or sprinting through breast radiation, maybe there’s a happy medium. UK IMPORT LOW demonstrated that not-accelerated partial breast irradiation (PBI) was equally effective and less toxic than whole breast radiation when each is delivered with external beam to 40 Gy in 15 fractions. Remember, this is in contrast to accelerated PBI. Here we have patient-reported outcomes at 5 years. Almost 60% of patients reported no moderate to marked adverse event (AE). The most prevalent AE was change in breast appearance (20%) that remained stable throughout follow-up. Other AEs, such as hardness, pain, or sensitivity generally became less frequent during follow-up. As expected, large lumpectomy defects and large breasts were the main baseline predictors of AEs. Most interesting, women in the partial breast arms experienced significantly less AEs at all time points than those in the whole breast arm. TBL: Five years out from external beam hypofractionation, moderate to marked AEs happen in the minority, decrease over time, and are less common after partial versus whole breast radiation. | Bhattacharya, J Clin Oncol 2018