Radiotherapy May Cure Cancer, But It Is Causing Deaths From Non-Cancer Illnesses

Radiotherapy is used to cure cancer patients. Researchers, however, recently found that a certain kind of radiation therapy can give people higher chances of dying from non-cancer illnesses.

Researchers from the Netherlands Cancer Institute found that a type of radiotherapy called stereotactic body radiation therapy, or SBRT, can lead to non-cancer deaths. SBRT is used to treat patients who have early stage non-small cell lung cancer, or NSCLC, EurekAlert reported.

High Doses Of SBRT Can Be Lethal

Experts discovered that high amounts of SBRT on the heart's left atrium and the superior vena cava over the years increases the chances of patients having non-cancer deaths. SBRT uses multiple radiation beam angles, and has the ability to deliver sharp and precise doses of radiation outside the cancerous tumor and the surrounding normal tissue, the UCLA Radiation Oncology wrote.

Study leader Dr. Barbara Stam said their team is studying methods that can give radiotherapy to patients while avoiding important structures of the heart. For the research, 565 patients and multiple structures of their hearts were examined, including the superior vena cava, left and right atria, left and right ventricles, descending aorta and left pulmonary artery.

The researchers are clueless about what caused the non-cancer deaths. The lung cancer patients examined had an average age of 73 when they died in their own homes, and autopsies weren't performed on them, EurekAlert added.

Philip Poortmans, the president of the European Society for Radiotherapy and Oncology, or ESTRO, said experts should study the effects of radiotherapy doses to a patient's other internal organs. He advised that doctors should lower the radiotherapy dose distribution to the heart, but it should be able to hamper the cancerous tumor's growth.

SBRT Cures Prostate Cancer By 98 Percent

A study conducted for five years found that SBRT has a 98.6 percent cure rate for prostate cancer patients. That statistic puts SBRT in a higher position than traditional prostate cancer treatments like surgery and conventional radiotherapy, which only have an 80 to 90 percent cure rate, Science Daily reported.

Other conventional treatment choices for prostate cancer are external beam radiation, prostatectomy and brachytherapy. These treatments take 44 sessions over nine weeks while SBRT only takes five treatments to complete. With the convenience offered by SBRT, patients can return to their normal lives faster.

The short-term side effects of SBRT on prostate cancer patients are urinary problems and rectal irritation, which are temporary issues that can be fixed during treatment. Also, there are fewer erectile dysfunctions among patients who received SBRT than their counterparts who underwent conventional radiotherapy and treatments.

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