Sunday, November 28, 2010

How is radioactivity applied in the treatment of cancer

How is radioactivity applied in the treatment of cancer?
Since radioactivity causes cancer, what science is behind its medical aplication? And what is "artificial radioactivity" Does it have anything to do with the med application of radioactivity?
Physics - 7 Answers



Random Answers, Critics, Comments, Opinions :
1 :
I don't know of radioactivity being used, as far as I know they were still using chemotherapy, which is chemicals injected, not radioactivity.
2 :
well not all types of radioactivity is harmfull,a radioactive sample is injected in the blood to detect the cancer tumer,then its radioactivity is detected as it passes through the body .the radiation helps to know how much the cancer has spread and exactly where it is
3 :
in the form of chemothereapy only the part that is affected is treated
4 :
While exposure to radiation can cause cancer, concentrated radiation to tumors can kill cancer cells as well. There are two common types of radiation therapy, X-ray radiation therapy and Proton therapy. You can read about it in the sources listed below.
5 :
Yes, indeed, radioactivity can cause cancer, if the body is exposed to a massive amount of radioactive rays. Radioactive rays have the propriety of killing living cells, mostly the rapid multiplying cells, such as skin cells, hair cells, blood cells, intestine cells and... cancerous cell. If a living cell is irradiated with radioactive rays, the rays produce ionization of the atoms in the cell chemical structure, so the DNA chain is changing. If the cell detects that its DNA chain is damaged during the division, it will self destruct. Using radioactive rays in a controlled way, it is possible to kill cancerous cells. For deep tumors, or tumors in inoperable places, high-intensity X-rays or gamma rays are focused on the tumor. The problem with this sort of treatment is that normal cells can be affected along with the abnormal cells. Hair cells, cells lining the stomach and intestines, skin cells and blood cells reproduce quickly, so they are strongly affected by radiation. The visible side effects are skin burn on the irradiated area, hair loss and nausea. Radioactivity is also used to diagnose patients using PET scans or CAT scans (tomography). for more details, technics, radionuclids used, imaginig equipments see: http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-medicine.htm http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_medicine
6 :
Radioactivity harms cells by altering the DNA in the cells. You can imagine radiation as shot gun pellets except on an atomic level. When you are exposed to radiation, it is like billions of little pellets shooting into and through your body. These particles will occasionally hit a strand of DNA, altering it. Once this occurs, the cell keeps on replicating this DNA and thus you get cancer if the DNA gets mutated in a certain way. If the DNA is damaged enough, the cell will not be able to replicate and it will die. This is the idea behind radiation treatment for cancer. What doctors do is they target the tumor with strong, focused beams of radiation. This damages the cancer cells' DNA so much that the cells eventually die and cannot reproduce. Now to do this without damaging other cells, they use multiple beams, each with intensity low enough that it won't damage your normal cells too much. Then, they point these beams at different angles and intersect them where the tumor is. At that point, the cells will be recieving a deadly dose of radiation. This is a very simplified explanation, and there is much more to it. However, this is the basic idea.
7 :
Radioactivity in high enough doses kills cells. Like chemotherapy, radiotherapy relies on the fact that cancerous cells tend to be more fragile than normal ones, so die first. But there is a second trick with radiotherapy which is to use narrow beams of radiation and fire them through the body from all sorts of different directions, but all directions going through the tumor. Only the tumor will be exposed to every beam, so it gets a much bigger dose than any other tissues.



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