Almost all head and neck tumor patients, especially nasopharyngeal carcinoma patients, will ask one question when they come for their first review after radiotherapy: Dr. Qin, my face and neck are swollen, what is the reason? Is it a recurrence of the disease? This question has become a heart problem for many patients.
There is a saying in many places in China: men are afraid of wearing boots, women are afraid of wearing hats. It means that men are afraid of swollen feet and women are afraid of swollen faces. In short, edema, no matter what the cause, is considered a sign of a major illness. Therefore, patients who have finished radiotherapy are kindly reminded by many relatives, friends, classmates, neighbors, etc., upon their return home, whether your face is swollen? When more and more people say that, it naturally creates an invisible tension for the patient, worrying whether the disease is recurring.
In fact, if you have a basic understanding of edema after radiotherapy, you will not be nervous. One of the important radiotherapy areas during head and neck radiotherapy is the lymph node drainage area in the neck, which is rich in lymphatic channels. These lymphatic vessels are like sewers and are mainly responsible for recycling fluid from the head and face as well as from the tissue spaces in the neck. After radiation therapy, most of the lymphatic vessels in the neck are occluded, and the fluid return from the head and neck is impaired and collects under the skin, resulting in edema. However, as the body recovers, some of the lymphatic vessels will reopen and some new ones will grow out, so the edema will slowly subside as time goes on.
In our experience, edema starts to appear one to two months after radiotherapy, and it is most severe three to six months after radiotherapy, and basically subsides six months to one year after radiotherapy. Therefore, patients who have received head and neck radiotherapy and have edema should not interpret it as a relapse of the disease and should not be nervous.