Avoiding Cardiac Toxicity in Lung Cancer Patients
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Avoiding Cardiac Toxicity in lung cancer patients treated with curative-intent radiotherapy to improve survival
IRAS ID
216324
Contact name
Kevin Franks
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
The Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
Duration of Study in the UK
2 years, 4 months, 30 days
Research summary
Radiotherapy plays a major role in the treatment of lung cancer and recent advances have improved cure rates. However, the dose needed to destroy the cancer cells can unfortunately also damage the surrounding organs, such as the heart. The precise mechanism of damage and which area of the heart is more sensitive to radiation is not currently known. This project uses the analysis of large amounts of existing radiotherapy data to determine this. Establishing detailed radiotherapy dose limits for the heart will lead to the delivery of heart-sparing radiotherapy, where possible, in lung cancer patients treated in Yorkshire and Greater Manchester. For these patients we think this will improve one-year survival by approximately 10%.
The overall project comprises seven ‘work packages’ (WP), of which this study makes up the foundation work and are called ‘WPs 1&2’.
WP1 will focus on the data mining validation:
*Validation of the correlation found between the dose of radiotherapy given to the heart and the subsequent mortality of these patients.
*Data from Manchester lung cancer patients treated with curative radiotherapy will be validated using data from patients in Leeds. The cohort in Leeds will have been treated with either standard curative radiotherapy or SABR which will allow cardiac toxicity to be modelled in greater detail.
WP2 - collection and analysis of retrospective cardiac risk factors:
*Radiotherapy planning CT scans will be analysed to quantify any coronary artery calcification .The calcification severity will be correlated with survival and other cardiac risk factors.
*We will identify and record clinical risk factors to ascertain the pre-RT heart disease risks. For each patient we will obtain information on current and previous medical history, smoking status, current medications and calculate their Qrisk®3 score from the electronic patient record (EPR).
*We will also Identify the cause of death from the (EPR) and link this to the NCRAS dataset.REC name
Yorkshire & The Humber - Leeds East Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
18/YH/0058
Date of REC Opinion
16 Mar 2018
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion