A new treatment could allow prostate cancer patients to experience less severe side effects from radiation therapy.
(ABC News)When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 69 in September of last year, Robert Heinkel wanted to make sure that he got the best treatment with minimal side effects.
An engineer by profession, he began learning as much as he could about the disease that now afflicted him.
"First I took about 30 days and did a lot of research," said Heinkel. "My whole objective was to pick a therapy that had the least side effects."
What he found was a procedure that uses the same GPS (Global Positioning System) technology that is in cars -- except in this case, the technology helps doctors navigate around tumors to make radiation treatment much more effective.
Heinkel traveled to the Swedish Cancer Institute in Seattle, Wash., where he became one of the first patients in the world to take advantage of this technology, known as the Calypso 4D Localization System. The technology was recently approved by the FDA for use in patients.
Radiation therapy is nothing new; in fact, according to figures from the American Cancer Society, it is used to treat about one million cancer patients in the United States each year.
However, one downside of radiation treatment is that the beam sometimes misses the tumor and irradiates nearby organs and tissues. In prostate cancer treatment, this radioactive "friendly fire" can cause complications like impotence, urinary incontinence and rectal bleeding.
And due to the nature of the prostate, doctors sometimes have difficulty drawing a bead on these tumors.
"The prostate can move a few millimeters from day to day, or even during the same daily treatment," said Dr. Majid Mohiuddin, assistant professor of radiation oncology at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore.
Mohiuddin says further damage to surrounding tissues can occur because cancer doctors will usually treat the prostate with a margin of extra radiation around the borders of the treatment area just to ensure that the entire tumor has been irradiated.
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