Bloomberg — Brain cancer patients aged 70 and older lived longer if they were given radiation following surgery, a study found.Those who received radiation, along with medicine and other supportive care, lived an average 12.2 weeks longer than those who didn’t get radiation, according to research published in tomorrow’s New England Journal of Medicine. No difference was found in the patients’ quality of life, the study said.

No standard treatment exists for patients aged 70 and older who suffer from glioblastoma, a common type of brain tumour in which the median survival time is nine to 12 months. This was the first study to look at radiation treatment in these patients, said study author Jean-Yves Delattre.

“Our hope was to improve both survival and quality of life in treated patients,” said Delattre, a doctor at Salpetriere Hospital in Paris, in an April 10 e-mail. “Tailoring medicine for the elderly will be an important challenge of the next medical generation.”

Researchers enrolled 85 patients from February 2001 to January 2005 to receive either supportive care, or supportive care plus radiation. Supportive care included treatment with steroids and anticonvulsants, physical and psychological support and medical care.

The researchers found that after 21 weeks, those given radiation had a 53 percent reduction in their risk of dying than those having supportive care alone. On average, patients in the radiation group survived for 29.1 weeks, compared with 16.9 weeks in the supportive care group.

At the 21-week follow-up point, 73 patients, or 90 percent, had died, according to the study.

More than 20,000 people in the US this year will be diagnosed with tumours of the brain and other parts of the central nervous system and 12,740 people will die, according to the National Cancer Institute. Brain tumours account for up to 90 percent of all primary central nervous system tumours. A primary tumour is one that is at the original site where the cancer first started.

It is unclear how many people in this population suffer from glioblastoma worldwide, although the numbers are rising in most industrialised countries, Delattre said. The reason for the increase is unclear, he said.

“Evidence-based medicine generally relies on data obtained in relatively young adults and their results may not be applicable to an elderly population,” he said. “It is important, in our ageing civilisation, to demonstrate that treatments are also potentially useful and tolerable in fragile elderly patients.”