What are the side effects of radiation therapy?
What are the side effects of radiation therapy?
Side effects of radiation therapy, like surgery, are different depending on what organs are being treated. Since radiation is also a “local” treatment, it primarily affects those structures that directly surround the field.
Radiation therapy does not cause pain as you receive it. In addition, other than specialized forms of radiation in which radioactive sources are surgically placed within a patient, there is not a risk of “passing along” the radioactivity to your friends and loved ones.
Radiation side effects are typically divided into two types: short-term side effects, which occur during and in the weeks following radiation, and long-term side effects, which don’t occur right away but can happen months or years after treatment has occurred. These long-term side effects are often less likely to occur but can be more significant.
The most common short-term side effect is fatigue, which typically happens after 1-2 weeks of radiation and is usually at its worse approximately 1-2 weeks after treatment, resolving over the next several weeks without further intervention. Many patients also develop some redness of the skin in this same timeframe. If the tumor that is being treated in the center of the chest (the tumor is centrally located or lymph nodes are being treated), many patients can develop temporary inflammation of the esophagus causing discomfort with swallowing, heartburn, and/or nausea. There are medications that can be used to treat many of these symptoms.
The most common long-term side effect is radiation pneumonitis, a pneumonia-type syndrome that is not caused by an infection but rather an inflammatory reaction that is caused by radiation. This side effect typically occurs 1-6 months after radiation and is treated with steroids if causing significant symptoms. Other potential long-term side effects are permanent increases in shortness of breath, damage to the airways, and scarring of the esophagus. The risk of most of these is low but is based on an individual patient’s treatment plan and should be discussed with the radiation oncology team.
August 2022
Professor Daniel Gomez's contribution to this article is in a personal capacity and he has been supported by Varian (company that manufactures radiotherapy equipment), AstraZeneca, Olympus, GRAIL, AstraZeneca and MedLearning Group.