Do you feel as though you have exhausted your treatment options for cancer? The battle to fight cancer is generally a long one. You never quite know what treatment plan will work best for what types of cancer and for each individual person. That?s why it?s important to keep an open mind to all of the different possibilities so that you have the best chance possible of beating your cancer. Proton cancer treatment is an option that may prove to be beneficial to individuals, especially if they need a prostate cancer cure or head and neck cancer treatment options.
Interested in learning more about proton treatment for different types of cancer from prostate, to head, to neck? Keep reading for more information on how proton radiation therapy works for these different types of cancers.
What Proton Therapy Is and How it Works
Proton therapy differs from other types of cancer therapy treatments because of how it works. It directly targets a very specific part of tissue. Radiation isn?t simply distributed everywhere or in a centralized location. Instead, it is sent to a specific point. When you are doing regular radiation therapy, the radiation can move throughout your body past the location of the tumor.
If regular radiation moves throughout and can go past your tumor, that means it can affect other areas of your body depending on what type of cancer you have. So, if you have breast cancer or lung cancer, the radiation can move from those areas into other areas of your body which you may want to avoid with proton therapy. Instead of radiation hitting your lungs or heart when you?re trying to target your breasts, no radiation hits the heart and 50% less hits the lungs during proton therapy radiation.
For each session of proton therapy, whether it?s proton therapy for head and neck cancer or for prostate cancer, lasts from around 15 to 45 minutes. The actual time spent delivering the protons to the tumors is far less, though. This only takes about 1 to 2 minutes of your time.
Proton therapy for head and neck cancer or for a myriad of other cancers is becoming more popular as a treatment option. In 2015, the industry was expanding rapidly with more than 30 particle therapy centers under construction across the world. Each of these treatment centers has multiple treatment rooms available for patients. So, in total, there are around 80 new treatment rooms that will be available once these centers are finished and open to the public.
Reasons to Choose Proton Therapy Depending on Your Cancer Type
There are a number of beneficial reasons to choose proton therapy as a potential treatment plan for your cancer. When it comes to prostate cancer, there has been quite a bit of research done on how this form of therapy affect patients and their cancer. For men with prostate cancer, research has been done tracking their progression depending on the type of prostate cancer risk they were at when they had proton therapy.
For men with low-risk prostate cancer, 99% of the time there was no sign of cancer recurrence when those individuals had their follow-ups five years after becoming cancer-free. If the men had intermediate-risk prostate cancer, the percentage of them who had no sign of cancer recurrence five years later was at 94%. For those with high-risk prostate cancer, around 74% had no signs of cancer recurrence during their five year follow-up appointments.
When you do proton therapy for prostate cancer or proton therapy for head and neck cancer, you can also help lower the risk of other issues popping up due to radiation exposure. For prostate cancer specifically, levels of impotence decrease with this form of treatment. Nearly 95% of men claim that they can remain sexually active after proton therapy whereas that may not have been an option with traditional radiation treatment.
Have you ever considered proton therapy for head and neck cancer or a different type of cancer? Why would you personally choose this type of cancer treatment? Let us know in the comments about your experience finding a cancer treatment that works best for you.
