About radiotherapy for prostate cancer

Radiotherapy uses high energy waves to treat cancer. If your cancer has not spread beyond the prostate gland you can have radiotherapy to try to cure it. This is called radical radiotherapy. This type of treatment involves giving a high dose of radiation to the prostate gland. Radical radiotherapy is more likely to cure you if your cancer is caught very early. In localised prostate cancer, radiotherapy gets rid of the cancer for good in about 2 out of 3 men (over 60%). If the cancer has started to spread outside the prostate gland it is less likely to be cured.

There are different ways of giving radiotherapy to try to cure prostate cancer. There is detailed information about both these types of treatment in this section of CancerHelp UK. The main two ways of giving radiotherapy are

• External beam radiotherapy
• Internal radiotherapy (brachytherapy)

Radiotherapy is used in two main ways to treat more advanced prostate cancer. It can be used for

• Treating individual areas of spread
• Treating the whole body to control pain

There is detailed information about radiotherapy to treat prostate cancer that has spread in this section of CancerHelp UK.

Treating individual areas of spread

External radiotherapy is used to shrink secondary tumours and so control pain. It is mainly used to treat secondary cancer in the bones. The treatment works by killing off most of the cancer cells in the treated area. This makes the cancer shrink, and so relieves the pressure on nerves that causes pain. Secondary bone cancer also weakens the bones because the growing cancer cells destroy the bone. A bone affected by cancer is more likely to break (fracture), although this is rare in prostate cancer. After radiotherapy treatment, bone cells begin to replace the lost bone tissue. Then the bone gets stronger again and is less likely to fracture.

Treating the whole body to control pain

Treatment to control symptoms is called palliative radiotherapy. Sometimes a large area of the body is treated in one go with a lower dose of radiation from an external radiotherapy machine. This is called hemi body irradiation.

If several areas of bone are affected by cancer, an internal radiotherapy treatment with strontium 89 may be used. This is a radioactive liquid therapy (radio isotope) given by injection into a vein. The radio isotope circulates throughout the body. It can destroy the areas of cancer cells in the bone. This type of treatment can help to control pain. It can also slow down the rate of growth of the cancer in the bones.

The radiotherapy section of CancerHelp UK contains general information about radiotherapy, including

• What radiotherapy involves
• How your radiotherapy treatment is planned
• Possible side effects

UK Prostate Link can also direct you to more information about radiotherapy to treat prostate cancer.