STOCKHOLM (Reuters) Giving breast cancer patients radiotherapy and chemotherapy at the same time significantly cuts the risk their tumours will come back and should be considered as a new treatment approach across the world, cancer experts said recently. The double treatment, known as synchronous chemoradiation, could also save lives among people with breast cancer, a disease that currently kills 425,000 women a year worldwide, according to the British experts who conducted a major scientific study. They said the synchronous treatment, which the study showed has limited side effects and does not harm patients' quality of life, should be considered for use by all breast cancer doctors."The results have implications worldwide," Indrajit Fernando, a consultant clinical oncologist at the University Hospitals Birmingham Trust, told reporters at the European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress (EMCC) in Stockholm."Clinical practice needs to be reviewed." Breast cancer is the most common cancer among women. A recent study by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation in the United States found that in 2010 it killed around 425,000 people and was newly diagnosed in 1.6 million. Radiotherapy and chemotherapy are usually given after breast cancer surgery to kill any remaining cancer cells in the breast, chest wall or underarm area, and to try to reduce the risk of a local cancer recurrence. The standard approach is to give chemotherapy first, followed by radiotherapy. But the best timings for radiotherapy and chemotherapy have long been debated among cancer experts, so Fernando's team decided to study various schedules of radiotherapy with a type of chemotherapy called anthracycline-CMF chemotherapy in patients with early-stage breast cancer. The study involved almost 2,300 women in Britain who had already undergone surgery to remove their tumours. The results showed that compared with the standard approach, giving both treatments at the same time "reduces the risk of local cancer recurrence by 35 percent in women with early breast cancer", Fernando said.