Side Effects of Radiation Treatment for Lung Cancer

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Doctor Kenneth Fink. I'm a medical oncologist at Zimmer Cancer Center at New Hanover Regional Cancer Center, Wilmington, North Carolina. Radiation therapy for lung cancer is a very aspect of the treatment. Most patients with lung cancer will find themselves getting radiation, almost all of them will some where along the line. For patients whose cancers cannot be removed radiation therapy is generally the treatment that's recommended. Radiation is basically just like X-ray energy and it passes through the body and it can damage the cancer cells, and in doing that can actually shrink the tumors down and potentially even cure it. But unfortunately radiation energy is a little bit, is a little bit energetic and it can cause some damage to the local tissues. As the radiation energy is passing through a person's body, it has to go through the skin and in the tissues and into the lung and it can scatter a bit around tissues that are near the lung or the lung cancer. There are a lot of important tissues, as you can imagine . There's your esophagus, your heart is there and even the surrounding normal lung is in that area. And all those tissues can be slightly damaged. The damage is usually quite small and usually not very noticeable. But some patients do have some trouble perhaps with swallowing, especially as they get towards the end of the radiation therapy. The radiation takes about four or five weeks given on a daily once a day basis and by about the fourth or fifth week patients are saying, boy, I'm having a little trouble swallowing, they may have a little esophagitis caused by radiation damage to their esophagus. But that usually gets better. We have people just drink some liquids and try to stay away from harsh foods and that generally works out pretty well. Some people may get some damage to the surrounding lung and may get a little bit of a scarring our just some inflammation around there, they may notice a little bit of shortness of breath or a cough. That's usually very treatable and patients can be given some steroids or some other anti inflammatories. And that radiation, pneumonitis as we call it, will improve. That can happen as early as a few weeks after completing radiation or as many as a few months after. So it's not always predictable when radiation pnuemonitis will occur. Damage to the heart is very rare, the radiation oncologist are very good at keeping radiation away from the heart and not damaging the coronary arteries for example, so patients generally don't get any heart damage. Long term damage from radiation therapy is very unusual, most patients don't have any chronic problems. Although some people if they really had a big dose and had a very big tumor may have problems with their lung. If the tumor's too big for example, a radiation therapist won't even treat that patient because they know it'll cause too much damage to the surrounding lung. Some folks may get a little bit of that and may have a bit more shortness of breath than before, and that's really about the only long term side effect. Development of a second cancer caused by radiation energy is extremely rare. They're very unusual cancers of the bone or the soft tissues that may occur after a person's been exposed to radiation. This could occur years later, but again, highly highly unusual. The thyroid is another organ up in the upper neck up here so for a person who's radiation is given high up in the chest there can be potentially damage to the thyroid and they could develop hypothyroidism or low thyroid function. That's something that the doctor usually remembers to check for but it's important for patients to remember that as well. They might ask to have their thyroid function checked after they've had some radiation. So in general radiation therapy is very well tolerated, with very few side effects. But a few usually nuisance things that tend to get better, again the esophagus and the lung being the main organs that are affected by radiation."