Radioactive Iodine Therapy for Breast Cancer
Originally, radioactive iodine therapy was meant for treating thyroid cancer. However, some years back people started talking about the use of this therapy for treatment of breast cancer. One of the most notable benefits that radioactive iodine therapy can offer to breast cancer patients is reducing the period of treatment from 6 weeks to only 5 days.
What radioactive iodine therapy actually is? It is a therapeutic procedure using radioactive agents for killing the cancer cells. This procedure can be carried out in different ways. During treatment of thyroid cancer, the patient is asked to ingest a liquid or a pill made from radioactive materials. However, patients with breast cancer receive a different mode of radioactive iodine therapy. A capsule or seed containing radi
oactive agents is placed inside the body of the breast cancer patient using either though balloon brachytherapy or interstitial brachytherapy.
During interstitial brachytherapy, thin tubes get implanted in the affected regions of the breasts. Radioactive pellets are then administered into those tubes two times every day. During balloon brachytherapy, a device called MammoSite is used for inserting radioactive pellet agents into the balloon placed on the affected regions of the breasts. Similar to interstitial brachytherapy, in this procedure also the pellet materials get placed only in and around the cancerous tissues of the breasts; this makes sure that the healthy tissues are not damaged.
Iodine 131 and iodine 125 are the two radioactive isotopes of radioactive iodine; these isotopes are the primary ingredients of the pellets used for radioactive iodine therapy. The other energy sources included into the pellets are strontium 89, cesium, iridium, cobalt, phosphorus, phosphate and palladium.
Radioactive iodine therapy is now used widely all around the world for the treatment of breast cancer and offer great results in majority of the cases.
