New lung cancer treatment to be tested at St Luke’s

A new treatment for lung cancer will be tested on Irish patients for the first time at St. Luke's hospital in Dublin today.

The Active Breathing Control technique will be trialled at St. Luke's before being rolled out at other hospitals around the country.

Experts claim it could radically reduce the number of people who die from lung cancer in this country.

Doctor Patrick Corley of the Irish Cancer Society explains how the procedure works: “When the patient is breathing in and out, a device stops the patient breathing out at a particular time, and at that time the radiation is delivered to the lung in a particular area.

“This actually causes a precise dose of radiation just to the diseased tissue, and spares the surrounding healthy tissue,” he said.

“In some cancers its hoped to be able to reduce the amount radiation to healthy tissue by about 12.5%, so with patients who have a very poor prognosis this could be a significant factor in producing the mortality from lung cancer,” Dr Corley added.