PALLIATIVE RADIATION THERAPY

Palliative care is any form of medical care or treatment that concentrates on reducing the severity of disease symptoms, rather than providing a cure. The goal is to prevent and relieve suffering and to improve quality of life for people facing serious, complex illness.

According to the WHO, palliative care is "an approach that improves the quality of life of patients and their families facing the problems associated with life-threatening illness." In some cases, palliative treatments may be used to alleviate the side effects of curative treatments, such as relieving the nausea associated with chemotherapy.

Palliative radiation therapy is used for the treatment of cancer to reduce pain and improve patient's quality of life. Such treatment is commonly used to improve symptoms by decreasing bleeding associated with cancer, pressure on nearby organs or structures, and pain associated with many forms of solid tumors. Radiation therapy damages the DNA of cells in its path; malignant cells are less able to repair their DNA and therefore more likely than healthy ones to die. This procedure can be delivered by external beam radiation, brachytherapy, or radioactive drugs given intravenously or by mouth.

When deciding whether to receommend palliative treatment, the physician will consider the patient's overall condition, how much radiation treatments might help him, how difficult or inconvenient radiation therapy might be and what side effects are likely. Palliative radiation treatments can be especially helpful for cancer patients who have:

- A cancer that has spread (metastasized) to the bones or brain.
- A tumor that is pressing on the spinal cord and could affect the ability to walk or move.
- A tumor that is making it hard to eat, breathe or have bowel movements.
- Bleeding in the stomach, throat, bladder or other parts of the body.

Cancer syndromes and symptoms that are treatable with radiation include painful bone metastases, brain metastases, spinal cord compression, superior vena cava syndrome, and bleeding associated with stomach, esophageal, head, neck, bladder, and cervical cancers among others. External beam radiation of lytic lesions in bone yields pain relief in more than 75% of patients treated. Healing and reossification of nonfractured bone occurs in 65% to 85%of lytic bone lesions treated with radiation.

Malignancies most commonly subjected to palliative XRT are lung cancer, bone metastases, brain metastases, advanced pelvic malignancies, lymph node metastases, and spinal cord metastases. Lung cancer is the most frequent cancer in North America and is the most common cause of cancer-related mortality in both men and women. Palliative XRT is an integral part of treatment of patients with lung cancer-related lesions causing atelectasis, post-obstructive pneumonia, shortness of breath, large airway obstruction, and pain.

Many patients receive palliative radiation therapy 5 days a week for 1 to 3 weeks. However, some patients have fewer treatments or only 1 treatment. The procedures take a few minutes each and are not painful.

Improvement in symptoms following palliative radiation therapy depends on the patient's particular medical condition. Side effects can appear right away or they may take longer to develop. In many cases, your physician or radiation therapist can help relieve side effects. Some of the side-effects are:

- Some patients become tired because of the radiation.
- Skin reddening in the area that was treated also is possible, but it usually does not occur at the radiation doses used for palliation.
- Other side effects depend on the body part being treated. For example, patients who have treatments to the abdomen might have nausea, diarrhea or both.

Sources:
http://www.jaoa.org
http://www.asrt.org

For affordable palliative radiation therapy overseas,  contact Healthbase - medical tourism provider.