RADIOTHERAPY

What is radiation therapy? When is it used?
Radiation therapy uses high-energy particles or waves, such as x-rays, gamma rays, electron beams, or protons, to destroy or damage cancer cells. Other names for radiation therapy are radiotherapy, irradiation, or x-ray therapy.

Radiation therapy is one of the most common treatments for cancer. It’s often part of the treatment for certain types of cancer, such as cancers of the head and neck, bladder, lung, and Hodgkin disease. Many other cancers are also treated with radiation therapy.

Radiation can be given alone or used with other treatments, such as surgery or chemotherapy. In fact, certain drugs are known to be radiosensitizers (ray-dee-oh-SENS-it-tie-zers). This means they can actually make the cancer cells more sensitive to radiation, which helps the radiation to better kill cancer cells.

There are also different ways to give radiation. Sometimes a patient gets more than one type of radiation treatment for the same cancer.

How does radiation therapy work?
Radiation therapy uses special equipment to send high doses of radiation to the cancer cells.

Most cells in the body grow and divide to form new cells. But cancer cells grow and divide faster than many of the normal cells around them. Radiation works by making small breaks in the DNA inside cells. These breaks keep cancer cells from growing and dividing, and often cause them to die. Nearby normal cells can also be affected by radiation, but most recover and go back to working the way they should.

Unlike chemotherapy, which exposes the whole body to cancer-fighting drugs, radiation therapy is usually a local treatment. It’s aimed at and affects only the part of the body being treated. The goal of radiation treatment is to damage cancer cells, with as little harm as possible to nearby healthy tissue.

Some treatments use radioactive substances that are given in a vein or by mouth. In this case, the radiation does travel throughout the body. But for the most part, the radioactive substance collects in the area of the tumor, so there’s little effect on the rest of the body.