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Convenience


Radiotherapy that meets the needs of patients

A course of brachytherapy can be completed in less time than other radiotherapy techniques.

  • Brachytherapy typically takes 1 to 5 days, compared to a number of weeks with conventional external beam radiotherapy (EBRT).
  • Brachytherapy is more time efficient and patient friendly, allowing patients to get back to their everyday life sooner.


Advantages of short treatment times

As explained in the efficacy section, brachytherapy enables high radiation doses to be precisely delivered to target tumors.

  • A disadvantage of EBRT is that to deliver an overall effective radiation dose, the delivery of the radiation must be broken up into many individual doses (fractions) delivered across an extended period of time.
  • This is necessary to avoid delivering harmful doses of radiation to the surrounding healthy tissues.

EBRT brachytherapy



In contrast to EBRT, the precision nature of brachytherapy enables highly effective radiation doses to be delivered in a much shorter time-frame, without compromising on safety.

This has a number of advantages:

  • Better tumor control, as cells have less chance to repopulate between treatments.2
  • Lower total dose of radiation is required to destroy cancerous cells3 reducing the potential risk of complications and side effects.
  • Shorter overall treatment and subsequent recovery times minimize disruption to patients' lives, during and post treatment.4,5
  • Patients may be more likely to adhere to treatment plans.
  • Largely outpatient procedures enable efficient use of resources.
  • Flexibility for both patients and clinicians.


Advantages of brachytherapy

Learn more about the advantages of brachytherapy for different types of cancer:


References
  1. Prostate Cancer published by Raconteur Media in The Times, 28 October 2009.
  2. Stewart AJ et al. In Devlin PM (Ed), Brachytherapy: applications and techniques. Philadelphia, PA, LWW. 2007.
  3. Pisansky TM, Gold DG, Furutani KM, et al. Mayo Clin Proc 2008;83(12):1364–72.
  4. BMJ Group (June 2009). Available at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/besttreatments/prostate-cancer-treatments-internal-radiotherapy-brachytherapy. Accessed 30 December 2009.
  5. Kelley JR et al. In Devlin PM (Ed), Brachytherapy: applications and techniques. Philadelphia, PA, LWW. 2007.
Page last updated on 14 January 2011.

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