Dr. Joel Aronowitz — Quick Explanations: Effects of Radiation
Dr. Joel Aronowitz: “So, let’s talk a little bit about radiation. We’ve just had a YouTube about a patient who had radiation for tumor on his face. So, radiation represents typically gamma rays that are used to go through the area of concern. Usually it’s for cancer, sometimes it’s to treat keloid or other conditions.
As the gamma rays, these are high energy waves as they go through the tissue. They don’t really hurt any tissue except for tissue that is actively dividing. So, if a cell is actively dividing, its DNA is duplicated and it’s unwound, it’s uncoiled, and it’s going to be sensitive to injury by external forces like a high energy gamma ray.
So, dividing cells get killed or severely damaged by radiation. And the idea is that there are more dividing cells that are cancerous than not. So, if we give radiation, we’ll kill the cancer cells and we’ll kill very few of the normal cells. That’s the basic idea. It does not, however, inoculate that tissue for developing cancer later.
In fact, radiation sometimes can cause cancer by causing mutations in the DNA. And it also has effects on the tissue that last for years. So, the effects are that it causes a fibrosis. That fibrosis gets thicker and thicker around little blood vessels and makes it difficult for the oxygen and the carbon dioxide to diffuse across the blood vessel to the cell and back to the hemoglobin molecule in the capillary.
So that process is interfered with by the fibrosis caused by radiation. And that just gets worse and worse and worse over time. So, the fundamental injury to the tissue is not something that gets better over time. It’s something that gets worse over time. And surgeons who’ve operated on patients who’ve had radiation know this very well, that the longer there’s been since the radiation injury, the more prone that area of the body is to not healing properly.
So many times, you require radiation to treat an area that had a cancer. Sometimes you use it for keloids and like I say, other things. But it’s always a good idea before you have a treatment like radiation that is going to have a permanent effect on that area of the body to ask a lot of questions and to really understand what the long-term implications are for that treatment because it may be something that you feel like,
Well, the benefit to me doesn’t really outweigh the downside to it. So just a little bit of information about radiation therapy. There are a lot of different radiation therapies out there, but that’s the fundamentals.”
Originally published at https://drjoelaronowitzmd.blogspot.com on February 7, 2024.
