Travel Distance to Radiation Therapy and Receipt of Radiotherapy Following Breast-Conserving Surgery

Breast-conserving surgery (BCS) fol-lowed by radiation therapy is an effica-cious alternative treatment to mastec-tomy for women with early-stage breast cancer (1,2). However, 15%–30 % of the women treated with BCS for early-stage disease fail to undergo postoperative breast irradiation, despite the known in-creased risk of ipsilateral recurrence as-sociated with the omission of radio-therapy (3–8). Older age has been identified as a major determinant of not receiving radiotherapy after BCS (4,6,7,9). Other factors that could ac-count for failure to receive radiation