Chemo + Radiation Best for Bladder Cancer, Study Finds

HealthDay – 29 mins ago WEDNESDAY, April 18 (HealthDay News) -- The addition of two well-tolerated chemotherapy drugs to radiation therapy led to significantly longer survival rates among patients with muscle-invasive bladder cancer.

In a new study splitting 360 patients into groups receiving radiation alone or radiation plus chemotherapy, British researchers found that those undergoing combined therapies had a 67 percent rate of local disease-free survival after two years, compared with 54 percent in the radiation group. Five-year overall survival rates were 48 percent in the chemo-radiation group, compared with 35 percent in the radiation-only group.

"Overall, the results establish that the addition of chemotherapy to radiotherapy should become standard practice for organ-preserving treatments of bladder cancer," said Dr. Manish Vira, director of the fellowship program in urologic oncology at the Arthur Smith Institute for Urology in Lake Success, N.Y. "The tried-and-true treatment method is still

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