Where people with prostate cancer used to have to go to hospital 35 to 40 times, they are now often gone with five radiation treatments. Many women with breast cancer only need to go to the hospital five times instead of 15 to 30 times. Patients with melanoma no longer have to go to hospital for immunotherapy every three weeks, but once every six weeks.
Corona not only ensured that working from home was suddenly applied massively in business. It also led to a faster introduction of new methods in the medical world. “Doctors were careful to take cancer patients to hospital for fear that they would contract covid,” says digestive oncologist Karen Geboes (UZ Gent). “As a result, new treatments, whose benefits had already been demonstrated in international studies, were applied much faster on a large scale.”
For example, in the treatment of colon cancer, they discovered that waiting longer after five days of radiation, followed by chemotherapy, offers just as good a chance of survival as someone who has radiation and chemotherapy for five weeks at the same time in the hospital. In patients with breast or prostate cancer, fewer radiation treatments with higher doses were found to work just as well. Crucially, better radiation equipment was introduced, which makes it possible to fight a tumor much more precisely without damaging the tissue around the tumor.
It is equally important that the reimbursement of the treatment was adjusted during corona. “In the past, you had to perform at least fifteen radiation sessions to be entitled to the highest reimbursement rates,” says radiotherapist Mark De Ridder (UZ Brussel). “In the corona crisis, that has been reduced to five sessions for breast cancer.”
Recovery trajectory more bearable
Initially, the treatment period was the same, but patients had to go to hospital less often. “With prostate cancer, we had patients come to the hospital once a week,” says Piet Dirix, radiotherapist-oncologist at Iridium, the largest radiotherapy network in Belgium. “But we now know that five radiation treatments in a week and a half work just as well.”
Rony De Grande, secretary of patient association Think Blue Flanders for people with prostate cancer, calls it ‘a great improvement for cancer patients’. “If you have to drive back and forth to the hospital more than thirty times, you get sick of it. These new treatments make the recovery process much more bearable.”
Nevertheless, doctors insist that consultation with the patient is always necessary. For example, higher doses during radiation treatments can also lead to higher side effects. “You can’t just give higher doses to patients with cervical cancer or throat cancer, for example, because then you irradiate the entire pelvis or the entire neck,” says Dirix. “We have to wait for more precise treatments for those diseases.”