Breast Cancer Radiation Therapy – The Best Cure Of All?

Physicians and scientists have made tremendous progress in developing cancer treatments in recent years and they still continue to make innovations. As a result of these advances, survival rates have increased.

Chemotherapy and radiation therapy are two of the primary treatments. Radiation therapy—also called radiotherapy—is a highly targeted and effective way to destroy infected cells that remain lingering after surgery. It also reduces the risk of recurrence. Though many women fear radiation therapy, radiation therapy is comparatively easy to tolerate, and the side effects are restricted to the area being treated.

How does radiation work?
Radiation behaves pretty much like light, but it has much more energy, and is invisible to the human eye. In radiation therapy, high-energy beams of radiation are to be focused on the breast from which cancer was removed. Over time, the focused radiation damages cells that come in the path of its beam—normal cells as well as damaged cells. Cancer cells are busy growing and producing new cells—two activities that are highly vulnerable to radiation damage. Since infected cells are less well organized than healthy cells, they are almost always unable to repair the damage and recover. As a result, the infected cells are destroyed by radiation while normal healthy cells repair themselves and survive.

There are two ways to give radiation therapy • Internal radiation
Internal radiation is a rare option. In this technique, radioactive material is temporarily placed within the breast, where the tumor used to be. This is typically reserved for the end of treatment and is usually given as an additional "boost," to supplement the regular radiation given to the whole breast. Studies on this type of radiation treatment continue to go on.
• External radiation
The term "radiation therapy," generally implies external radiation. In this technique, a large machine called a linear accelerator delivers high-energy radiation to the affected part of the breast. This treatment is received as an outpatient in daily sessions over five to seven weeks, depending on the situation.

Why is it necessary to get radiation therapy? Though it is quite possible that your surgeon removed the whole cancer, no surgery can guarantee that every last cancer cell has been removed from the body of the patient. Individual cells are so small that they cannot be felt and seen during surgery or detected by X-ray. If any damaged cells remain after surgery, they grow and eventually form a lump or show up as an abnormality on a mammogram. These cells can even spread to other parts of your body as metastases.

After surgery for breast cancer, no woman would want to have even the slightest of chance that the disease will occur again. Thus radiation therapy provides an extra insurance policy to help her achieve that goal.

This is the reason why your doctor will suggest that you start radiation therapy soon after your surgery or after you complete chemotherapy. Without radiation therapy after surgery, you may have a much higher risk of the cancer returning.