Obesity, not the amount of radiation given, is the greatest factor in whether early-stage lung cancer patients develop chest wall pain after receiving stereotactic body radiation therapy to the chest wall, with obese patients being more than twice as likely to develop chronic pain compared to those who have less body weight, according to a first-of-its-kind study presented Tuesday, November 3, 2009, at the 51st Annual Meeting of the American Society for Radiation Oncology (ASTRO).
Researchers studied other factors associated with obesity, such as diabetes, to find out why obesity in patients increased chest wall pain. Findings show that obese patients who are diabetic are over three times more likely to develop chest wall pain after receiving stereotactic body radiation therapy to the chest wall, compared to patients who do not have diabetes.
"The study shows that physiological factors, such as obesity and diabetes, can play a major role in the development of radiation-related toxicity," James Welsh, M.D., lead author of the study and a radiation oncologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston said. "This is a surprising finding, since most side effects of radiation treatment are based on the amount of normal tissue that is treated and the volume of the dose."