With a $13.3 million grant from Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston will study whether traditionally aggressive treatments such as radiation and surgery lead to better patient outcomes for those with non-invasive breast cancer than a wait-and-see approach, reports the Boston Business Journal.
As more health insurers move to cover policy holders on a budgeted basis in Massachusetts' hospitals, healthcare systems have come to question the viability of expensive procedures that offer little to no benefits. Working under a bundled payment arrangement, the less hospitals can perform unnecessary, costly procedures for patients, the more apt hospitals are to drive revenue and improve care quality.
"The majority of women diagnosed with ductal carcinoma in situ will not develop invasive cancer, meaning that many women are currently being treated with minimal to no potential benefits," said Ann Partridge, MD, a senior physician in the Susan F. Smith Center for Women's Cancers at Dana-Farber and the study's co-principal leader, according to Boston Business Journal.
In the study, conducted with the help of researchers from DukeMedicalCenter in Durham, N.C., and MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, patients diagnosed with DCIS will be randomly assigned to either a group receiving current standards of treatment (including surgery and/or radiation) or a surveillance group. The trial will enroll 900 patients.
Researchers said they hope to study if the incidence of cancer, survival and mastectomy rates and quality of life differ between the two groups, reports Boston Business Journal.
Ductal carcinoma in situ is the most common type of non-invasive breast cancer, with about 60,000 cases diagnosed in the U.S. each year, according to the American Cancer Society.