When Misinformation Metastasizes

摘要

An MD Anderson study, presented at the San Antonio Breast Cancer Symposium on Dec. 7, 2011, compared five-year results from a national Medicare Claims database of older women with breast cancer who underwent partial breast irradiation (PBI). This is not a clinical trial, and therefore, lacks strict selection criteria for PBI that are built into well-designed, prospective clinical trials.There were key features of these breast cancer patients unavailable to the MD Anderson authors, including known risk factors for local recurrence, such as surgical margin status, estrogen receptors, treatment details and other known prognostic factors. The study is simply a look backward at a large group of unselected U.S. women, treated by antiquated technology (single-channel balloon catheters) with no quality control.