Why palliative radiotherapy?
What is palliative radiotherapy? Simply put, it is radiation therapy that only serves to reduce symptoms or delay tumor progression, but does not completely destroy the tumor. It is effective for symptom control, but at the current level of medical care, breast cancer cannot be cured once distant metastases occur. Therefore, the purpose of palliative radiotherapy is not to cure the disease, but simply to relieve the patient’s discomfort, stabilize the tumor through radiotherapy, slow down the progression, and prolong life to a limited extent.
Which patients will receive palliative radiotherapy?
Some breast cancers will metastasize to sites other than the breast, such as bone metastases, brain metastases, liver metastases, or lung metastases. After metastasis to a distant site, the appropriate clinical symptoms will occur.
The main symptom of bone metastases is pain, which can lead to pathological fractures and affect quality of life. For patients with breast cancer who develop bone metastases, radiotherapy can reduce pain with a clinical efficiency of about 70%. For bone metastases in sites such as the femur or spine of the thigh, palliative radiotherapy is also effective in reducing the risk of pathological fractures.
Brain metastases are a serious and dangerous condition because the volume of brain tissue is fixed and protected by a hard skull with limited space outside. When a brain metastasis occurs, the tumor grows in and inevitably increases the size of the entire brain, but the outer skull does not expand accordingly, so when the tumor grows to a certain size, it squeezes the brain tissue and causes symptoms of elevated cranial pressure, such as headache and vomiting, which can quickly lead to respiratory and cardiac arrest and death. The doctor will usually carry out brain radiotherapy as soon as possible after the occurrence of brain metastasis to actively control the development of the tumor, which can effectively reduce the size of the tumor on the one hand, thus reducing the symptoms of elevated cranial pressure, and on the other hand, can also prolong life.
How is palliative radiotherapy done?
Like radiotherapy for other patients, palliative radiotherapy can be done with a variety of radiotherapy techniques, such as 3D conformal radiotherapy, intensity-modulated radiotherapy, stereotactic radiotherapy, tomo radiotherapy, etc. The physician will choose the appropriate radiotherapy technique based on a variety of factors, including the site to be radiated and the size of the tumor.