Radiotherapy – Positive or Negative Effects on Cancer Cells?

More and more scientific studies disapprove of the conventional treatment used against cancer. They suggest that radiotherapy and chemotherapy are in fact contributing to the death of patients who suffer from cancer.

Researchers from the Oncology and Radiotherapy Department from UCLA Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center claim that the radiologic treatment leads to even stronger cancer stem cells, which are immune to therapy.

This study does nothing but sustain other scientific research claiming that mammography is leading to a development of cancer cells through radiations.

Conventional Treatment – Why isn’t it working?

In order to understand the reasons, you have to know first some things about the cancer stem cells.

The tumors are made of a large variety of cells, most of them being totally benign. Cancer stem cells are the most dangerous, because they have the ability to produce other types of cells inside the tumor. The process is named mitosis. Through this process, they increase the population of stem cells.

This means that cancer stem cells are able to produce tumors. They are deadly because they initiate and maintain cancer. Moreover, they may cause relapses of cancer after the treatment. For this reason, the main target of the treatment should be these cancer stem cells.

Some researchers affirm that the reason why conventional treatment does not work is the fact that this kind of treatment doesn’t have the cancer stem cells as a target. On the contrary, an exposure of cancer stem cells to chemotherapy and radiotherapy strengthens them and facilitates a longer life for them. Even in the cases when radiation killed 50% of the cancer cells from a tumor, the ones who survived become 30 times more likely to form tumors in comparison with the cells unexposed to radiotherapy and chemotherapy.

To be more specific, radiotherapy reduces the total number of cancer cells, giving a false appearance of the efficiency of the treatment. In fact, the benign cells from the tumor are almost all killed, and some of the malign cells. But the remaining malign cells have a greater resistance to the treatment and they are able to produce other malign cells. This way, the condition of the patient seems to improve for the moment, but is getting worse in time. The result is the death of the patient – a death caused by the treatment.

Another study published in the Journal Stem Cells revealed that ionizing radiation leads to a higher number of cells in the tumor that are immune to the treatment.

Evidence in favor of preoperative radiotherapy

A study conducted at the University of Chicago revealed that preoperative radiotherapy is more efficient than postoperative radiotherapy. The preoperative one has better results regarding the survival rate on the cancer patients, increasing this rate with 10%.

The participants in the study who had radiotherapy before the operation increased their lifespan with five years, without any sign or relapse. Their results were compared to the results of the patients who had radiotherapy after the operation.

In both cases, better effects have been noticed when radiotherapy was combined with chemotherapy.