For many men with prostate cancer, the word “radiotherapy” still conjures up weeks of daily hospital trips: 20 or more sessions, Monday to Friday, for a month or longer. A new NHS England programme aims to shrink that burden dramatically by offering eligible men a highly focused form of radiotherapy that treats the cancer in just five sessions.

It sounds almost too good to be true: a comparable chance of controlling the disease, with far fewer visits and much less disruption to work and family life. But five-session treatment can still cause short-term and longer-term side-effects.

So what exactly is changing, and what should men make of it?

A sharper way to deliver radiation

The approach is called stereotactic ablative radiotherapy, or SABR. You may also hear it described as stereotactic body radiotherapy, or SBRT, and more colloquially as “multi-beam” or “high-precision” radiotherapy.

Instead of delivering smaller doses over many sessions, doctors give a higher dose at each appointment while targeting the prostate accurately.

Picture several torches shining from different angles. Each beam is relatively weak, but the light becomes intensely bright where they meet. SABR works in a similar way. Advanced imaging and computer planning map the target area, sometimes using tiny implanted markers as reference points. The machine delivers multiple beams that converge on the prostate, while nearby healthy tissue receives much less radiation.

That precision allows the schedule to shrink from at least 20 daily sessions to five doses within a fortnight. The appointments do not necessarily take place on five consecutive days.

Why NHS England........

© The Conversation