For most people with radiation-related diseases, like cancer, radiotherapy can help in treatment, either alone or along with other forms of treatments. The therapy can help patients with more advanced cancer by improving their quality of life and easing their symptoms.
How Radiotherapy Works against Cancerous/Cancer Cells
At higher doses, radiotherapy destroys cancerous cells or reduces their growth by destroying their DNA. Cancerous cells with damaged DNA either die or stop dividing. When damaged cells die, they will break down and be removed by the patient’s body.
According to experts at UEW Healthcare, radiotherapy doesn’t destroy cancerous cells immediately. Instead, treatment takes weeks or days before a patient’s DNA gets damaged. Those cells will continue to die for days, weeks, and months after radiotherapy ends.
Treatment Options
When we require cancer care, we may need the latest options for treatment from cancer specialists with professionalism. Here are some of the options that can help treat cancer:
1. SRS (Stereotactic Radiosurgery)
It is a type of radiotherapy that delivers precise radiation doses from the patient’s outside body to every targeted area in the body. Despite the name surgery, the procedure does not involve incisions.
2. Chemotherapy
This form of therapy uses chemotherapy medicines or drugs to kill cancerous cells. These medicines travel through the patient’s bloodstream, destroying cancerous cells in the process. Less common forms directly enter our body parts with cancerous cells.
For instance, surgeons, at times, directly inject chemotherapy drugs into body cavities with cancer. Similar to radiation, patients get chemotherapy in combination with several other treatments.
3. Hyperthermia
Hyperthermia is a treatment where body tissues get heated to about 113 °F. This helps kill and damage cancerous cells with little or without destroying normal tissues. Before you go through this treatment, learn about cancer types and precancers that the procedure can treat, how it’s done, and the pros and cons of using it.
4. 3DCRT (3D Conformal Radiation Therapy)
This option uses 3D scans to evaluate tumors’ exact sizes and shapes. Beams of radiation are often shaped by tiny metal leaves to fit tumors. This, in turn, reduces the side effects of healthy cells/tissues. Here are forms of cancer that the therapy can help with:
- Prostate cancer
- Brain cancer
- Lung cancer
- Neck and head cancer
- Liver cancer
5. Interventional Radiology
Interventional radiologists specialize in this. They use minimally invasive methods to treat illnesses without surgery. Image-guided catheters enable interventional radiologists to deliver small radioactive spheres or chemotherapy drugs directly to cancerous tumor sites.
In addition, they use a special needle to get rid of tumors through freezing or heat. Interventional methods are effective, too, for relieving pain and managing cancer’s side effects.
6. IMRT (Intensity-Modulated Radiation Therapy)
IMRT is one of the most sophisticated forms of external beam radiation that LINACS (linear accelerators) deliver. Oncologists or cancer specialists can change the shape and intensity of radiation beams to target radiation delivered to the prostate and limit radiation to nearby rectal and bladder tissues.
Due to the planning involved in this treatment, your doctor can deliver more effective, precise, and intense radiation doses with less risk of destroying surrounding healthy tissues.
The bottom line is that if you are diagnosed with cancer and radiotherapy is one of the ways to treat it, ensure you ask for specifics. Different radiotherapies exist that target specific tumor types and cancers. They enable specialists to deliver accurate radiation doses that can destroy cancer cells and spare healthy tissues.
