According to the European researchers, simple radiation treatment combined to chemotherapy after lung cancer surgery can double the survival time for patients with cancer that hasn’t yet spread through the body.

The patients had stage 3 lung cancer, which has spread to lymph nodes outside the lung but not throughout the body. Such patients often have the visible tumors removed and then get chemotherapy, too, to delay any further spread.

Dr. Jean-Yves Douillard, professor and head of medical oncology at Centre Rene Gouducheau, Nantes, France said, “In this study 47 patients with lung cancer survived for at least five years”. Dr. Douillard and colleagues in Italy and Spain tested 840 lung cancer patients, of whom 232 agreed to extra radiation treatment. The treatment doubled survival for some, but not all of the patients, Douillard told a meeting of the American Society for Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology in Philadelphia.

He added “This is the first time that a clinical trial has examined the effectiveness of radiation after surgery for lung cancer”

“The results show that radiation treatment should be considered for resected (surgically treated) non-small cell lung cancer with involved mediastinal lymph nodes in addition to chemotherapy.”

Douillard said that, just because the triple combination of surgery, chemotherapy and radiation works in some cancer patients, for other patients that kind of treatment may be too much therapy.

Lung cancer is the world’s biggest cancer killer, taking the lives of 95 percent of its victims. It kills 1.3 million people globally every year — more than 160,000 in the United States alone.

Because lung cancer rarely causes symptoms until it has spread, most people are not diagnosed until it is too late, and surgery, chemotherapy and radiation can only extend their lives for a few months or years.