Radiation therapy only modestly increases heart disease risk in women

New York Times : Radiation used to treat breast cancer has been known to increase the risk of heart disease in women, but the size of the increase was unknown. A new study has shown that a 50-year-old woman has a 1.9% chance of dying from heart disease by the age of 80. Radiation increases that chance to between 2.4% and 3.4%. Sarah Darby, a professor at the University of Oxford in the UK who led the study, says the risk increase is significantly outweighed by the benefit of the treatment, which halves the recurrence rate of the cancer and lowers the death rate by one-sixth. One of the study’s other important findings is that a woman’s risk for heart disease increased within the first few years after treatment. It had been believed that a woman didn’t develop heart disease until decades later. Doctors will now be better able to explain the risks and benefits of radiation as a treatment and to help patients deal with managing heart disease risk factors. They may also be able to come up with ways of administering radiation treatments, such as changing the position of the patient, that lower the radiation exposure to heart tissue.