Women diagnosed with breast cancer who may benefit from a less intensive therapy often can’t get it because it’s not as costly as traditional radiation treatments, according to an NBC News investigation.
Intraoperative radiation therapy, known as IORT, delivers a single, targeted dose of radiation to a patient’s breast tissue to remove a tumor. It’s a less expensive and arduous treatment that was approved in 1999, but it’s no longer widely available in the United States, according to doctors and surgeons.
Doctors say the treatment, which has been widely available overseas for more than two decades, is hard to come by because hospitals and medical professionals can command higher price tags for regular radiation. Ideal candidates for IORT are postmenopausal women with small, early-stage tumors and no evidence of lymph node involvement.
While research has shown that IORT can lead to slightly higher cancer recurrence rates than with whole breast irradiation, it also has similar long-term outcomes and lower mortality rates than other cancers.
And IORT treatment costs $8,000 to $10,000 — while whole breast irradiation costs $30,000 or more. The treatment could save $1.2 billion in the U.S. health care system over five years, according to research published in 2018.
Dr. Frederick Barker, a surgeon in Bluefield, Va., said other factors may be motivating the scarcity of the treatment in the U.S.
“The bottom line on this is women, through what are professed to be the best intentions of the medical community, are being denied a valuable option that they’re not being denied in countries other than the U.S.,” he told NBC News. “I think we have scientists with an agenda.”