When treatments are used to ease symptoms, they are known as palliative treatments. External beam radiation may shrink tumors to treat pain and other problems caused by the tumor, such as trouble breathing or loss of bowel and bladder control. When used to treat cancer, radiation therapy can cure cancer, prevent it from returning, or stop or slow its growth. Radiation therapy is used to treat cancer and ease cancer symptoms. Why people with cancer receive radiation therapyĬall, chat, or email with a Cancer Information Specialist. With systemic radiation, your body fluids, such as urine, sweat, and saliva, will give off radiation for a while. You receive systemic radiation therapy by swallowing, through a vein via an IV line, or through an injection. Systemic means that the treatment travels in the blood to tissues throughout your body, seeking out and killing cancer cells. Internal radiation therapy with a liquid source is called systemic therapy. With brachytherapy, the radiation source in your body will give off radiation for a while. Like external beam radiation therapy, brachytherapy is a local treatment and treats only a specific part of your body. In this type of treatment, seeds, ribbons, or capsules that contain a radiation source are placed in your body, in or near the tumor. Internal radiation therapy with a solid source is called brachytherapy. The radiation source can be solid or liquid. Internal radiation therapy is a treatment in which a source of radiation is put inside your body. Learn more about external beam radiation therapy. For example, if you have cancer in your lung, you will have radiation only to your chest, not to your whole body. It does not touch you, but can move around you, sending radiation to a part of your body from many directions.Įxternal beam radiation therapy is a local treatment, which means it treats a specific part of your body. other factors, such as your age and other medical conditionsĮxternal beam radiation therapy comes from a machine that aims radiation at your cancer.whether you will have other types of cancer treatment.your general health and medical history.how close the tumor is to normal tissues that are sensitive to radiation.The type of radiation therapy that you may have depends on many factors, including: There are two main types of radiation therapy, external beam and internal. Then, cancer cells keep dying for weeks or months after radiation therapy ends. It takes days or weeks of treatment before DNA is damaged enough for cancer cells to die. Radiation therapy does not kill cancer cells right away. When the damaged cells die, they are broken down and removed by the body.

Cancer cells whose DNA is damaged beyond repair stop dividing or die. How radiation therapy works against cancerĪt high doses, radiation therapy kills cancer cells or slows their growth by damaging their DNA.

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