Thanks to your donations, QEHB Charity has been able to fund ground-breaking research that teaches breast cancer patients to ‘breath-hold’ for over five minutes, reducing the risk of damage to healthy tissues.

When patients have to breathe during radiotherapy treatment their chest moves, creating the risk of damaging healthy tissue and organs, such as the heart or lungs. Although there has been a lot of clinical interest in breath-holding, currently when it is used for patients with cancer, patients can only hold their breath for about 20 seconds.

In 2007, the Queen Elizabeth Hospital Birmingham Charity funded a research project between Professor Stuart Green (Medical Physics), Dr Andrea Stevens (Oncology), Dr Michael Parkes (School of Sport, Exercise and Rehabilitation Sciences) and Dr Tom Clutton-Brock (Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Medicine), to see if patients could be trained to hold their breath for at least the two minutes typically required to deliver each standard radiotherapy session.

Dr Parkes explained: “The trial involves patients breathing special air mixtures through a facemask and being trained to be ventilated and then hold their breath for much longer than is usually possible. Our results show patients are able to breath-hold for an average of five and a half minutes, with some breath-holding for as long six and a half minutes.”

The team has undertaken a significant amount of developmental research using both volunteers and patients in the NIHR Wellcome Trust Clinical Research Facility and in the Cancer Centre, and have just published a paper in British Journal of Radiology  setting out the safety regulations for  clinical use of breath-holding and demonstrating how volunteers can be assisted and trained to breath-hold safely for five and a half minutes.

Dr Parkes continued: “We knew these techniques worked in healthy volunteers, but we never believed they would work as well in patients with breast cancer undergoing radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

“We have just presented the results from 15 patients with breast cancer at the Elekta Biennial Treatment Planning System meeting in Italy.  Delegates were astonished (as we had been) that patients could hold their breath safely and without discomfort for more than five minutes and assumed the title of the paper had a decimal point in the wrong place!

“We now look forward to raising more funds to establish how best to applying these techniques clinically.”

To support patients please donate today by clicking ‘donate’ to the right of this page, or by calling the charity team on 0121 371 4852.

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