Phase III Trial of Stereotactic Radiosurgery (SRS) Versus Hippocampal-Avoidant Whole Brain Radiotherapy (HA-WBRT) for 10 or Fewer Brain Metastases From Small Cell Lung Cancer

This study is being done to answer the following question: Will high dose radiation therapy delivered only to the small areas of brain cancer and avoiding the surrounding normal brain tissue, called stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS), decrease side effects related to memory and thinking compared to radiation to the entire brain, called whole-brain radiation therapy (WBRT), that avoids the hippocampus but treats all of the brain tissue along with a drug that helps preserve memory and thinking called memantine? For patients with brain metastases from small-cell lung cancer, WBRT avoids the memory zone in the brain called the hippocampus along with a drug that helps preserve memory and thinking called memantine. At the time of the development of this study, there have been no randomized clinical trials comparing WBRT and SRS approaches in patients with small-cell lung cancer. We are doing this study because we want to find out if the SRS approach is better.