29 Facts About Radiation therapy

Radiation therapy or radiotherapy, often abbreviated RT, RTx, or XRT, is a therapy using ionizing radiation, generally provided as part of cancer treatment to control or kill malignant cells and normally delivered by a linear accelerator.

Radiation therapy is synergistic with chemotherapy, and has been used before, during, and after chemotherapy in susceptible cancers.

Radiation therapy is commonly applied to the cancerous tumor because of its ability to control cell growth.

Radiation therapy oncology is the medical specialty concerned with prescribing radiation, and is distinct from radiology, the use of radiation in medical imaging and diagnosis.

Total body irradiation is a radiation therapy technique used to prepare the body to receive a bone marrow transplant.

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Radiation therapy has several applications in non-malignant conditions, such as the treatment of trigeminal neuralgia, acoustic neuromas, severe thyroid eye disease, pterygium, pigmented villonodular synovitis, and prevention of keloid scar growth, vascular restenosis, and heterotopic ossification.

Renal cell cancer and melanoma are generally considered to be radioresistant but radiation therapy is still a palliative option for many patients with metastatic melanoma.

Image-guided radiation therapy is a method that uses imaging to correct for positional errors of each treatment session.

For example, for breast cancer after breast-conserving surgery, radioRadiation therapy has been found to halve the rate at which the disease recurs.

In males previously having undergone radioRadiation therapy, there appears to be no increase in genetic defects or congenital malformations in their children conceived after Radiation therapy.

Radiation therapy is used to treat early stage Dupuytren's disease and Ledderhose disease.

When Dupuytren's disease is at the nodules and cords stage or fingers are at a minimal deformation stage of less than 10 degrees, then radiation therapy is used to prevent further progress of the disease.

Radiation therapy is used post surgery in some cases to prevent the disease continuing to progress.

One of the major limitations of photon radiation therapy is that the cells of solid tumors become deficient in oxygen.

Amount of radiation used in photon radiation therapy is measured in grays, and varies depending on the type and stage of cancer being treated.

Particle therapy is a special case of external beam radiation therapy where the particles are protons or heavier ions.

Radiation therapy oncologists perform stereotactic treatments, often with the help of a neurosurgeon for tumors in the brain or spine.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy refers to one or several stereotactic radiation treatments with the body, such as the lungs.

Intensity-modulated radiation therapy is an advanced type of high-precision radiation that is the next generation of 3DCRT.

Proof of improved survival benefit from either of these two techniques over conventional radiation therapy is growing for many tumor sites, but the ability to reduce toxicity is generally accepted.

Volumetric modulated arc therapy is a radiation technique introduced in 2007 which can achieve highly conformal dose distributions on target volume coverage and sparing of normal tissues.

Temporally feathered radiation therapy is a radiation technique introduced in 2018 which aims to use the inherent non-linearities in normal tissue repair to allow for sparing of these tissues without affecting the dose delivered to the tumor.

Auger therapy makes use of a very high dose of ionizing radiation in situ that provides molecular modifications at an atomic scale.

Contact x-ray brachytherapy is a type of radiation therapy using kilovoltage X-rays applied close to the tumour to treat rectal cancer.

BrachyRadiation therapy is commonly used as an effective treatment for cervical, prostate, breast, and skin cancer and can be used to treat tumours in many other body sites.

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Radionuclide Radiation therapy, is a form of targeted Radiation therapy.

Major use of systemic radioisotope Radiation therapy is in the treatment of bone metastasis from cancer.

Field of radiation therapy began to grow in the early 1900s largely due to the groundbreaking work of Nobel Prize–winning scientist Marie Curie, who discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium in 1898.

External beam radioRadiation therapy began at the turn of the century with relatively low voltage X-ray machines.