Local anaesthesia can up survival rate by 5 per cent in breast cancer patients, says study

As part of the study, 800 women were operated upon with anaesthesia, while as many were not given the medicine. Representation pic

The use of local anaesthesia can improve the survival rate in breast cancer patients from 81 per cent to 86 per cent, an 11-year-long study led by doctors at Tata Memorial Hospital has shown. The research can potentially save about 1 lakh lives across the world a year, said doctors associated with the initiative on Monday.

The study began in 2011 and included 1,600 breast cancer patients. It also involved doctors from 10 other cancer institutes. Of the women who took part in the study, 800 underwent surgery without the use of local anaesthesia, while the rest were given anaesthetics a few minutes before the operation.

Dr Sudeep Gupta, professor of medical oncology at Tata Memorial Centre (TMC) and director of Advanced Centre for Treatment, Research and Education in Cancer (ACTREC), said, "It's been 11 years since Dr Rajendra Badwe and other doctors have started this clinical trial. Our research reveals that the 0.5 per cent local anaesthesia lidocaine helps stop the spread of cancer cells to the other part of the body during breast tumour removal operations and because of that the survival rate in the patients has gone up by almost 5 per cent. For those who have not taken the anaesthesia before surgery, their survival rate is 81 per cent and for those who have been injected with the anaesthesia, their survival rate is 86 per cent."

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Dr Gupta, one of the co-investigators of the study, said Tata Memorial hospital gets about 5,000 new breast cancer cases every year. "This study provides an inexpensive and immediately implementable treatment for breast cancer that can be practised by every surgeon who treats this disease. The result is from a large randomized trial, which is the gold-standard way of evaluating the worth of new treatments and provides the highest level of evidence to support the use of this technique. This study is proof that Indian centres can design and conduct studies which have a global impact."

Doctors hailed the clinical research as an important milestone in the treatment of breast cancer as lidocaine is a commonly used drug that costs less than R100 and has no side effects when administered under expert supervision. They said some drugs earlier cost about R10 lakh per patient for targeted treatment.

Dr Badwe, director of Tata Memorial Hospital and principal investigator of the study - Effect of Peri-tumoral Infiltration of Local Anaesthetic Before Surgery on Survival in Early Breast Cancer - said it is the first of its kind study globally that has shown a sizable benefit by a single intervention before surgery. "If implemented across the world, it can save over 100,000 lives annually. For scientists, it opens the window of peri-operative intervention to modulate the environment of cancer in such a way as to prevent its deleterious reaction to the act of surgery [observation]. Evolving low-cost interventions for cancer has been a mission of Tata Memorial Centre and Department of Atomic Energy for the benefit of Indian and global population and this study, supported by the Department of Atomic Energy, is a major step towards Atma Nirbhar Bharat."

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No. of years the research took