Radiation Therapy Options
Conventional External Beam Radiation
- High-energy beams pass through the skin to treat the entire breast and eliminate any cancer cells that could remain after a breast cancer tumor is removed (lumpectomy).
- A daily dose of radiation is delivered for 5-7 weeks.
MammoSite® 5-Day Targeted Radiation Therapy
- Radiation therapy is delivered from inside the breast directly to the area where cancer is most likely to recur.4
- Targeting the area from the inside out reduces the exposure of normal, healthy tissue and organs to radiation.
- Using a highly targeted dose, radiation treatment is complete in 5 days.
- Side effects such as skin burning and fatigue are minimized.
- Most women continue normal activities through and immediately following treatment.
Delivering radiation from inside the body – also called “brachytherapy” – is used to treat many cancers. For example, use of brachytherapy as a treatment of prostate cancer goes back as far as 1917, and has been the standard of care for prostate cancer for several decades.
Gail Free, Greenwood, SC
“Cancer is not a breeze, but going through (MammoSite) treatment was so easy.”
Click here to see Gail’s story.
To hear more stories, visit www.VoicesofMammoSite.com
Dr. Louis Munoz, radiation oncologist, talks about the importance of radiation therapy.
 Access to radiation therapy
Video Transcript:
The critical thing that caused me to adopt this technique was patient access. When you look at the number of women who are not making themselves available for radiation when there has been breast conservation surgery, I was concerned. One of the things may be access to care. While I live in a metropolitan area, we do still access patients from the outside regions so distance can be a barrier. First of all, if the woman chooses mastectomy, that’s her decision. That’s equivalent therapy. But the concern that I have is the women who choose breast conservation therapy and then do not get postoperative radiation, we know that has an impact not only on the local recurrence rate, but does also have a survival impact.
MammoSite Therapy can be completed in 5 days
Video Transcript:
There are multiple reasons why a woman may not get postoperative radiation therapy after breast conservation surgery. First of all there may be fear, a misunderstanding of what radiation therapy is. Two, there may be difficulty with access. Distance is a barrier to receive your treatment. We know that beyond 50 miles can be a significant barrier and a falloff in women who make themselves available for the breast radiation. And the reality is the time constraints--six and a half weeks versus one week.
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