12th & 26th December Meetings 2010 Both are Charity Events
To be held at Harbour Hill off road site, Aldermaston Berkshire.
What is it for you ask-
Jay Brewer aged 6 yrs old, has a Brain Tumour, after two major operations at John Radcliffe Hospital and 18 months of chemotherapy failed, the tumour is pushing against Jays Optic Nerve making him blind in one eye and his pituitary gland making him go up in clothes sizes in a matter of months, he also sleeps up to 17 hours a day and has to be forced to drink every two hours, as his thirst has gone, little jays last hope is in Jacksonville, Florida America for a treatment call Proton Therapy. Jay would have to have a special mask moulded and have lots of testes before the 8 week treatment.
Proton Therapy: A New Cancer Treatment
Put simply, proton therapy promises better outcomes for patients undergoing cancer treatment, with the potential for fewer side effects.
Proton therapy has benefits over conventional therapy in the treatment of many common cancers, such as prostate cancer, cancer in children, lung cancer, cancers of the eye, and many more.
To understand the benefits of this new cancer treatment, it's important to understand how traditional radiation therapy works. A patient who undergoes conventional radiation therapy is exposed to X-rays. As they pass through both healthy and diseased tissue, X-rays leave a track of damage - much like a bullet. This damage can help destroy tumors, but may cause significant harm to surrounding areas. Protons, on the other hand, are more precisely targeted than X-rays. Protons also cause less damage to healthy tissue as they enter the body, and deposit the majority of their destructive energy at the tumor site. Once this energy has been deposited at the tumor site, there is no additional damage to the healthy tissue behind the tumor as there is no exit dose. This phenomenon is called the Bragg peak. As a result, normal, healthy tissue receives less exposure to radiation, resulting in fewer treatment complications. Fewer treatment complications enable our physicians to deliver higher doses of radiation to the tumor. This increased dose improves a patient's probability of a successful outcome.
The Benefits of Proton Therapy:
Early Detection Leads to Successful Treatment
The benefits of proton therapy are plentiful. Since most cancers begin as a local lesion that spreads - or metastasizes - to other areas of the body, if the local lesion is eradicated before disease spreads, the cancer can be cured. Because increased awareness and more sensitive screening tools have led to earlier cancer detection, more patients are candidates for treatments like proton therapy.1 What's more, effective systemic treatments can destroy tiny amounts of metastatic cancer, making the role of local therapies more important - even if a cancer has spread.2,3
Two types of local therapy are surgery and radiation. In general, surgery is used for cancers that can be removed without compromising a patient's function or quality of life. In other cases, radiation therapy is used either alone or in conjunction with surgery. Radiation is used in approximately half of all cancer patients at some time during the course of their disease.
The most common source for conventional radiation therapy is X-rays. As X-rays pass through the body, they cause damage to cells and tissues. While the effects of radiation are the same for the cells of tumors and normal tissue, tumor cells divide at a much higher rate and are therefore much more susceptible to radiation-induced damage. The higher the dose of radiation, the greater the cell damage to both normal tissues and tumor cells. In both traditional and proton therapies, dose selection is based on the goal of achieving the greatest benefits with the least risk of exposure of healthy tissue.
Delivering the appropriate dose of radiation can be easier with proton therapy, and a higher dose of radiation can be provided with less risk to healthy tissue.
The main advantage of protons in radiation therapy is that they have a smaller negative impact on the tissue that surrounds a tumor or lesion. Protons deposit a significantly smaller amount of their energy as they travel to the tumor site as compared to X-rays used in traditional therapy. Protons stop at the tumor site, whereas X-rays continue on their path - irradiating healthy cells as they travel through the rest of the body. To see a video explanation of this process, click here. With less concern about potential damage to normal tissues, the tumor dose can be escalated, leading to higher tumor control rates. The promise of protons is two-fold: enhanced tumor control and reduced complications - for a better quality of life for survivors.
For more information please go to the website below-
www.floridaproton.org/about-ufpti/what-is-ufpti.htmlThe target to raise for all this will be £10,000, so any help is better than no help.
If you would like to speak to Doreen May about any of this you may contact her on- 01189-882125 / 07946785742
Doreen will be at the meeting on the 12th December with us
