Understanding How Radiotherapy After Surgery Helps Prevent Cancer Recurrence
There are so many different forms of cancer, each of which relies on a treatment plan that can vary significantly from one diagnosis to another.
In some cases, a visit to a radiotherapy centre will be enough to destroy certain types of early-stage cancer early and help prevent it from intensifying or metastasising.
However, in other cases, radiotherapy will be used as an adjuvant treatment to remove not only the main cancerous mass but also as many cancer cells as it is safe to remove at one point.
In many cases, radiotherapy, chemotherapy and surgery, the three frontline treatments for battling most types of cancer, will be used in some combination, with the former two either being used to shrink the tumour to make it safe to surgically remove, destroy the remaining cancer cells not directly excised through surgery, or some combination of both.
They can also be used with targeted cancer drugs or immunotherapy treatments to help make them more effective. They can also be used in lower doses over a longer period to stop cancer from coming back.
What Is Recurrence?
After a diagnosis and a course of treatment, during which all of the cancer cells that can feasibly be removed have been, the cancer that a person was diagnosed with is no longer considered a threat to their health.
This is typically described as a cancer being in remission, as oncologists are hesitant to say someone is cured of cancer or is cancer-free without being able to prove that this is the case.
Complete remission, in many cases, is a declaration that tests show that there is no detectable evidence of cancer, which can sometimes mean someone is cancer-free but does not always.
Recurrence is when a cancer returns at least a year after treatment, either in the same place it was initially found or the same cancer might have moved to another point in the body.
If the cancer stops appearing on tests but then starts to again before then, it is not typically considered a recurrence but more that the cancer was damaged but did not truly go away instead.
How Often Does Cancer Recurrence Take Place?
Because there are a lot of different cancer types that behave in different ways, the likelihood of recurrence will differ tremendously depending on the type of cancer, where it is in the body, what has caused it, the types of treatment used and when it was diagnosed.
In general, early-stage cancers that are treated immediately are less likely to come back, which is one of many reasons why it is important to get tested as soon as possible to at least rule out the possibility of certain types of cancer.
Cancers that have not spread are also less likely to return, so cancer types that seldom spread such as basal cell carcinoma also rarely come back.
As well as this, recurrence is most common in the first two years after treatment, so every day that the cancer stays in remission means that it is decreasingly likely that it will come back
It is not always easy to predict, although with certain more common cancer types where the behaviour of the malignancy is better known, there is more understanding of the types of maintenance treatments that can be done to manage symptoms without harming the quality of life.
How Does Radiotherapy Help?
Radiotherapy can help in a wide range of ways to reduce recurrence or stop it entirely, depending on the treatment pathway, the nature of the cancer itself and how often it is used.
With early-stage cancer treatments, cancer radiotherapy may be the only course of treatment used and destroys all detectable cancer cells in a single course. This is often true with early-stage brain cancers, as the highly accurate stereotactic radiosurgical treatments used help to destroy cancer cells without destroying the brain.
Outside of radiotherapy being a primary treatment path, there are other ways in which radiotherapy can help with the avoidance of recurrence.
It can be used to shrink tumours, making them easier to remove and reducing the chance of micrometastases following surgery. It can also be used after surgery to destroy cancer cells in the local area.
Beyond this, it can also be used as a recurring treatment, either following remission to destroy any remaining cancerous cells that are possible to remove from the body or as a long-term maintenance treatment to keep someone in complete remission.
Each treatment will be chosen carefully to ensure it is the right option for an individual person and their circumstances, so not every person will have the same course of radiotherapy treatment at the same time.
