Precision Radiation Therapy Makes Strides in Colorectal Cancer Care

As Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month highlights the importance of early detection and advancements in treatment, according to Dr. Yufei Liu, precision radiation therapy has emerged as a way to manage the disease in a way that can preserve a patient’s quality of life.

In an interview with CURE, Liu discusses how these updates to radiation treatment are reshaping therapy, offering patients safer and more precise treatment options. For example, he references that some of these advancements now offer targeted radiation delivery, minimizing damage to surrounding healthy tissue. As colorectal cancer rates continue to rise among younger patients, this is a particularly important focus of care, taking fertility preservation into consideration.

Liu is an assistant clinical professor in the Department of Radiation Oncology at City of Hope in Duarte, California.

Transcript:

I would say that in terms of precision radiation techniques, that we've become much more precise and much more targeted than we used to be. The goal in the past was always to make sure that with radiation, we don't miss the target. Therefore, we often had to use very large field sizes for the radiation, and that would result in a large amount of normal organ being hit by the radiation, such as the intestines and the bladder; that can result in a lot of side effects from radiation treatment. With the advancements in radiation technology, we're able to see much more precisely where we're directing the radiation.

Now we're able to deliver it to the tumor with just a small margin around it, so that we don't need to treat as much normal bladder or the intestines, and in that way, we can help minimize the side effects from radiation as well. Especially relevant is that a lot of the patients who are getting colorectal cancer these days are younger patients as well. When it comes to preserving fertility, that's also a big consideration for radiation. With modern radiation techniques, we are able to do such things such as ovarian sparing radiation to treat the colorectal cancer, while at the same time minimizing dose to ovaries and minimizing the chances of premature menopause.

Transcript has been edited for clarity and conciseness

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