Proposed healthcare reform policies to rein in Medicare costs might not have much effect on high-cost patients who consume most resources. Instead, interventions tailored to improve care and lower costs for specific types of complex, costly patients may hold greater potential for reducing costs and improving care, according to a study published online Feb. 11 in Health Services Research.

The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center has completed the first of 45 planned post-lumpectomy high-beam radiation treatments as part of a clinical trial to assess the effectiveness of the focused, shorter-course treatment.

RadQual, a developer of quality control products for nuclear medicine, SPECT and PET imaging, has released a dose calibrator standard traceable to the National Institute of Standards and Technology for measurement of gallium-68 and fluorine-18 for up to 1 millicurie (37 MBq) strength.

IsoRay, which manufactures Cesium-131 used in internal radiation therapy (brachytherapy) for the treatment of lung, brain, colon, head and neck, ocular melanoma and prostate cancer, has announced its second quarter financial results that showed narrowing of net losses despite a decrease in net sales, which ended Dec. 31, 2010.

Tiny gold particles can help doctors detect circulating tumor cells in the blood of patients with head and neck cancer and other cancers, according to research published online Feb. 11 in Cancer Research.

A large proportion of physicians do not participate in clinical cancer trials, with a lack of funding and underdeveloped hospital infrastructures and IT preventing nearly half of cancer specialists from enrolling patients in research trials, according to a study published Feb. 11 in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute.

Among patients with early-stage breast cancer that had spread to a nearby lymph node and who received treatment that included lumpectomy and radiation therapy, women who just had the sentinel lymph node removed (the first lymph node to which cancer is likely to spread from primary tumor) did not have worse survival than women who had more extensive axillary lymph node dissection, according to a study in the Feb. 9 issue of Journal of the American Medical Association.

E.U. mortality rates from cancer are expected to maintain their nearly universal descent in 2011, with overall rates projected to fall by 7 percent, despite a 25-million person increase in the absolute number of deaths at 1.28 million, according to a study published Feb. 8 in the Annals of Oncology.