Starting radiotherapy
If you’re having radiotherapy for indolent non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL), you will probably have only one or two groups of affected body sites, usually corresponding to affected lymph nodes, which means you have early-stage disease.
Generally, in people with early-stage disease, treating the affected areas with radiation (radiotherapy) can achieve a cure in about half of patients. In the other half, radiotherapy will very likely cause a remission – a period of time when you feel generally healthy and experience few, or no, disease symptoms.
If your non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma does come back (relapse), it usually returns in other lymph nodes. If this happens, you will probably go on to have immunotherapy plus chemotherapy, as radiotherapy is likely to fail again if it did already once.
Most people who experience relapses of their indolent NHL can live successfully with the disease for a long time. Continuing on a treatment plan can help reduce your symptoms, and many people spend long periods of time in remission.
If your doctor has decided that radiotherapy is now the best course of action for you, here on Lymphoma Life you can find out more about what it involves, what to expect from your treatment visits for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and how to cope with the treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and its side effects.
Radiotherapy
• Radiotherapy uses external beams of radiation, which are focused on the affected areas, to kill, or slow down the growth of, lymphoma cells.
• It is important that radiotherapy treatment is planned very carefully to ensure that, as far as possible, only the lymphoma cells are affected by the radiation.
What is radiotherapy?
Radiotherapy uses therapeutic doses of radiation to kill lymphoma cells by damaging their DNA
Beams of radiation are concentrated directly on areas that are affected by non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (NHL). The radiation causes such severe damage to the DNA of cells in that area that it is impossible for the cells to repair themselves. This kills or slows the growth of the lymphoma cells in that area.
Normal cells can be damaged by radiotherapy as well as lymphoma cells
This has two important consequences:
1) Your treatment must be carefully planned, and the areas that will be targeted need to be mapped out accurately on your body to minimise the damage to normal cells. However, normal cells can repair themselves more easily than lymphoma cells.
Find out about visiting the clinic for radiotherapy
2) Because normal cells can also be affected, radiotherapy can have some side effects. These are mostly minor and will disappear once the course of radiotherapy is complete. Although they are rare, some long-term side effects are possible and these should be discussed in detail with your doctor before you begin therapy.
Coping with radiotherapy and its side effects
Your first treatment can be quite a challenging experience for anyone, and a radiotherapy treatment schedule can often be quite intense. So it may leave you feeling drained, both physically and emotionally. This is quite normal, but it means you will need to take it easy and look after yourself while you’re having treatment. To feel at your best, you should probably think about taking time off work as well as concentrating on eating healthily and getting lots of rest.