No abstract

Breast cancer or carcinoma of the breast (Ca-Breast) is the most common malignancy among women and the second most commonly occurring cancer overall in the world (1). In breast cancer, the most common treatment is conservative surgery or mastectomy followed by adjuvant chemotherapy and radiotherapy with or without hormonal therapy (2). Several prospective studies have shown that radiotherapy in Ca-Breast improved the disease free survival by almost 15% at 10 years and reduced the15-year risk of Ca-Breast death by 4% (3). Thus making the chronic sequelae of the breast cancer radiotherapy more important (4). But it has been shown that patients treated with radiation to chest wall or breast alone developed pneumonitis in 1% cases which increased to 4% in patients treated with loco-regional irradiation including draining lymph node (5).Oie et al. ( 6) reported that radiation pneumonitis (RP) mostly developed in ipsilateral lung and arose next to the rapidly decreasing dose area. Previous reports have shown that irradiation of the breast/chest wall with supraclavicular field led to an increased incidence of symptomatic radiation pneumonitis (7, 8) (SRP). Wen et al. ( 9) have suggested that the volume receiving 20Gy and 30Gy (V 20Gy , V 30Gy ) were