FDA approves new way to treat breast cancer

Delores Dean Lauren chose the less time consuming new radiation treatment.

(CNN) -- The U.S. Food and Drug Administration just approved a new, more convenient option for breast cancer treatment, but its effectiveness is not fully known yet.

Whether it will be as effective as traditional treatments will depend on results over the long haul. It's available to the more than 200,000 women diagnosed with breast cancer each year.

Mary Stoddard and Delores Dean Lauren are two such women. They both have breast cancer and opted to have lumpectomies -- surgery to remove only the cancerous lump.

After that, however, they made different choices.

CNN NewsPass VIDEO CNN's Rhonda Rowland reports on a new technique of radiation therapy for breast cancer (May 7) Play video   EXTRA INFORMATION How brachytherapy works Play video (QuickTime) See more graphic Source: Proxima Therapeutics

Stoddard chose conventional radiation therapy. She's up to Day 16. Every day for six weeks, she'll drive 20 miles each way to have a large machine beam radiation to the outside of her breast.

"I'm so confident in what's being done for me, it's small, it's a small price to pay," Stoddard said.

Lauren also got radiation, but it just took five days. "I'm a very active person and truthfully, I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible," she said.

Lauren's faster type of radiation is called brachytherapy.

Here's how it works: Rather than bombarding the body with radiation from the outside, a catheter is inserted into the area where the tumor was removed. Then a tiny, radioactive seed delivers the dose of radiation.

"The radiation therapy given with brachytherapy is radiation from the inside out," explained Dr. Robert Kuske of the University of Wisconsin Clinical Cancer Center. Kuske has studied brachytherapy in 260 women.

Mary Stoddard decided to stick with conventional radiation therapy.

In fact, brachytherapy has been used to treat many types of cancer, and has been used in prostate cancer cases for years.

This new technique could make a difference for the estimated one-third of women who fail to finish their radiation therapy because of logistics or women who opt for a mastectomy -- removal of the entire breast -- because radiation is inconvenient.

But questions remain.

"I really think that women need to understand that this has not been fully evaluated," says Dr. Ottis Brawley of the Winship Cancer Center at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia.

No one knows yet if brachytherapy is as good as the gold-standard form of radiation. "My own personal opinion right now is that it hasn't to me been totally proven to be effective," Brawley said.

Evidence is solid that Stoddard's six weeks of radiation will give her a 95 percent chance of living 10 more years.

For Lauren, who got five days of radiation, the answer is not in yet.