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Proton therapy is promising for breast cancer

September 25, 2014
Leonard Arzt
By Leonard Arzt

Recent research has demonstrated that treating breast cancer patients with conventional radiation may cause significant damage to their hearts. Fortunately, proton therapy offers a safe and effective alternative to conventional radiation. Proton radiation treats breast cancer without damaging the underlying tissues, including the heart, so that women no longer have to risk their hearts to treat their cancer.

As Dr. Carl Rossi, medical director of the Scripps Proton Center, San Diego, Calif., said, "The risk of treating women with breast cancer with conventional radiation is not trivial, nor are the costs to the patient and to society."

In a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2013, researchers analyzed the medical records of thousands of women who had been treated with conventional radiation for breast cancer over the last 40 years. The study revealed that as the years passed, these patients were at an increasing risk of developing heart disease and often needed to undergo expensive, difficult treatment like bypass surgery or angioplasty as a result. Their risk of experiencing these serious complications was directly related to the volume of the heart that was irradiated, and the total radiation dose that the heart received.

A research letter published in the JAMA Internal Medicine in 2013 estimated that the increased lifetime risk for a heart attack or other major heart event in women who had traditional radiation for breast cancer is between 0.5 percent and 3.5 percent, with women who had traditional radiation on the left breast at the highest risk because of the heart's position on the left side.

Dr. Rossi said, "Because of the shape of the breast and the chest wall and because of the fact that the conventional X-rays do not stop where you would like them to stop, in many cases, when you treat the breast with X-rays, you end up radiating a varying portion of the underlying heart, and when you radiate the heart you cause irreversible damage to the blood vessels and the heart muscle."

Unlike conventional X-ray therapy, proton therapy uses high speed particles that can be more precisely conformed to treat the tumor while sparing healthy tissue and without an exit dose. "Proton therapy for breast cancer allows clinicians to more carefully target the radiation and stop the protons before hitting the heart," Dr. Rossi says, "In many cases we can reduce the radiation dose to the heart to zero. Zero radiation equals zero chance of developing a radiation-induced side effect."

Tahmine Hoseinkhani

HI

January 22, 2015 04:39

Hi
my name is tahmine
I am student in medical physics department in medical faculty in Iran
I am tend to proton thrapy but I dont know I must be started from where?
this paper is usefull
but I am not a text book of proton therapy .
I am search and read about physics of proton therapy and carbon therapy in slides , and positive points in this method compare to radiotherapy but I dont know about negative points of poroton therapy and its limits .

if you have free time answered me and advice me a plan for study in this course
please if you have particles about modelling poroton therapy projects that are published tell me that how I can access ...

excuseme for my bad english writing
hoseinkhanitahmine@yahoo.com

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