Prostate cancer is the second most common cancer in American men, with approximately 250,000 new instances diagnosed every year. It starts when cells withinside the prostate gland, which is placed below the bladder and in the front of the rectum, start to grow out of control. While prostate cancer affects around 1 in eight men during their lifetime, the good news is that there are effective treatment options, which include a treatment called brachytherapy for prostate cancer.

Brachytherapy is a form of internal radiation therapy in which the radiation is positioned directly into the tumor to target cancer cells. The radiation, that’s in the form of a small pellet or “seed,” is placed inside the body using a needle and catheter close to or within cancer.

Two types of brachytherapy are used to deal with prostate cancer:

• Permanent, or low dose rate (LDR), brachytherapy entails placing small radioactive pellets or “seeds” inside the prostate. The seeds emit a specific quantity of radiation over a duration of months after which lose their radioactivity.
• Temporary, or high dose rate (HDR), brachytherapy entails setting a positive quantity of hollow needles for the duration of the prostate, after which a single small radioactive supply is connected to the end of wine moves in and out of the needles for specific quantities of time, creating a specific amount of radiation across the entire prostate. HDR prostate brachytherapy has been observed to be highly effective in treating prostate cancer with substantially fewer aspect outcomes in comparison to the seed implant and therefore, it’s far the simplest shape of brachytherapy used at Fox Chase. Depending upon the scale of most cancers, the HDR treatment is performed with the aid of using itself twice over weeks or as soon as combined with an external beam radiation therapy.

Brachytherapy is exceptionally powerful in treating prostate cancer. But its principal benefit is that it limits radiation exposure to the encompassing areas. By focusing on the precise vicinity in which the implants are positioned, radiation is given in high doses directly to the prostate with very few side effects. This is specific to outside beam radiation, where many prostate cancer patients can experience more side effects because of the radiation exposure to other close-by organs in the pelvis. Men tolerate brachytherapy quite well.

Photo by Anna Tarazevich from Pexels