Radiation Therapy For Cancer:
Radiation therapy is one of the most effective and worldwide available therapy for cancer patient treatment either for early stages or for advanced stages. In many cancer treatment sites, this therapy has shown the superiority to destroy or reduce tumour cells. Now a day, using radiation therapy, a non-invasive single fraction treatment procedure named stereotactic radiosurgery (SRS) is also delivered to cancer patients for destroying benign tumor or cancerous tumors. Radiation therapy is able to treat the whole total body irradiation (TBI) and total skin electron therapy (TSET) also.
Now, the radiation therapy is delivered by two ways:
- External beam radiation therapy (EBRT), &
- Brachytherapy
1. External beam radiation therapy (EBRT):
This is one of the most common radiation therapy treatment techniques for cancer patients.
EBRT refers to the delivery of targeted radiation beam from the outside of the body, through the advanced treatment units available worldwide.
This kind of course of treatment involves one-day treatments to a few weeks of treatment. EBRT treatment may be delivered through X-rays beam, gamma rays, or through particle beam such as electron beam, proton beam, carbon ion beam, neutron beam etc. This therapy may be given alone or with a combination of chemotherapy or surgery, based on treatment site and size.
In this treatment, the treatment unit (radiation machine) moves around the patient body, while delivering the radiation, without touching the patient. The treatment is designed in such a way that the cancerous cell must be destroyed while sparing surrounding normal and healthy tissues. Patients will never feel anything while delivering the radiation. The main advantage of EBRT treatment is that the patient doesn’t become radioactive during or after the treatment and it is a painless procedure.
This treatment technique is available for any treatment sites and any stage of tumor.
2. Brachytherapy:
The term brachytherapy was proposed first time by Forsell in 1931. Brachy is a Greek term, which means is “short distance”.
In this treatment technique, the sealed radiation sources are placed inside the tumor body or just next to the area requiring treatment.
It has the advantage to deliver a highly localized dose of radiation and a very less dose to surrounding healthy tissue. This is a less number of fractions treatment, relative to EBRT.
To insert the radioactive material inside the tumour body, the applicators (a device which is used to hold the radioactive sources in place during brachytherapy, these are non-radioactive, generally these are needles, plastic tubes etc.) are placed inside the tumour body through the small surgical operation of the patient with local anaesthesia. The radioactive sources which are used for treatments are Cobalt-60, Iridium-192, Cesium-137, Iodine-125, Palladium-103 etc.
However, this technique has some limitations that the large and multi-nodal cancer tumors cannot be treated by this technique.
The radiation therapy may be delivered to the patients alone EBRT or alone brachytherapy or in a combination of both.
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