We have a caregiver who wrote in and she's wondering if if she can be around
her husband when he's having radiation. So, is there any type of radiation that
a man would receive for treatment of prostate cancer where somebody couldn't be around them?
So, when you go for proton therapy, external beam radiation with SBRT or IMRT, there's
no radiation after you leave the facility; the radiation is administered and it dissipates 100%,
so no concern whatsoever in that regard. There are two types of brachytherapy,
one, temporary high-dose-rate seeds; again, no radiation is left in the body after you leave
the facility when you're done with your treatment; there's no radiation left. Permanent seeds do emit
radiation for anywhere from two to six weeks after the implanted seeds are put in the prostate and
patients are all carefully advised to, you know, not have babies sit on their lap and this sort
of thing. It's probably more out of fear of lawyers than it is fear of damage because the
radiation emitted by these seeds only goes for about a half a centimeter, so that means
that it's not going to get outside your body. So, the people that do have permanent seeds
are in theory radioactive for a few weeks after their treatment and precautions are
always exercised, though, perhaps the concerns may not need to be as large as what people stipulate,
but for all the beam radiation types, there is no radiation exposure to surrounding people at all.
We've gotten this question also regarding Xofigo, which is an injection that people get
and it's radiation to the bones, so with that radium-223 is there any concern there at all?
Well, sort of like the seed implant, because the radiation emitted from the radium is over
such a short distance, it really can't get out of the body to hurt anybody.
They do take precautions when people urinate and defecate and because of, you know— flush
the toilet twice and these sorts of things. The radiation distance being so small means that it's
very very safe variant of radiation.
So, we have a patient who's experiencing erectile dysfunction from the radiation he received,
and he his doctor is saying that he shouldn't take testosterone,
but he's wondering if there's anything that he can do to help mitigate the side effects?
Well, testosterone hasn't been shown to be a great way to restore erections unless someone's already
hypogonadal maybe from their lupron, and I don't know about this particular case, but there are
people who've been on Lupron and finished their projected course of Lupron and unfortunately
don't recover their testosterone afterward and are consigned to having low testosterone for the rest
of their lives. That doesn't seem right because when we stop Lupron, we expect testosterone to
come back, being produced by the testicles, so it is possible to take testosterone once a person
has finished the scheduled course of Lupron—and I just use Lupron as a generic name. So, that
idea of giving testosterone to someone with low testosterone might be helpful actually,
but it's not the first thought in people that have normal testosterone; giving extra testosterone
doesn't accomplish anything and the management of erectile dysfunction is, you know, it's a fairly
well-understood area. You know, people start with things like Viagra and Cialis, and then there's
injection therapy, and there are implanted prostheses; there are all kinds of things that
could be done obviously starting with the simpler medical type solutions like Viagra, Cialis.
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