The holidays were great. Friends and family visited, you played hours of games of cards and explored new board games as well. You laughed. You laughed so hard you cried. You stayed up late and woke up early, ready to tackle day after day of spending time with the people who you love the very most.
At the end of the busy break, however, you realize that it was something more than just a house full of company that had been on your mind. With an unexplainable pain and a struggle to even wake up and get out of bed in the morning, you feared that it was more than the end of the holiday break that had you down.
Have You Recently Received a Difficult Cancer Diagnosis?
A diagnosis of cancer is no way to begin the new year. Unfortunately, every single day there are thousands of people who find out that they have this disease, so the beginning of the new year is no exception. Fortunately, there are new advanced cancer treatment options that provide many patients with the hope that they need in looking for a cure.
From advanced cancer treatment options for prostate cancer to proton radiation therapy for other types of cancers, it is important to get all of the information that you need and to understand all of the available options before you make any decisions.
When a patient, and the patient’s family, receives a cancer diagnosis, it is important to realize that these first few hours of the diagnosis can be a challenge. Fear and other emotions take over and it is likely possible that you will not remember many of the things that the doctor tells you. For this reason, most patients schedule a second meeting to go over all of the available possibilities, as well as understanding the benefits, costs, and risks of the latest advanced cancer treatment options. Cancer treatment therapy options continue to expand and it is important to note that with the latest research there are many times when patients can have a much better prognosis than they would have had five or ten years ago. And while there are many things that you may be looking forward to in the new year, it is important to realize that a cancer diagnosis today may not have the same implications of one you have have received in the past.
Consider some of these facts and figures about the many times when the use of advanced cancer treatment options can help patients face the new year and new decade with more hope than they may have had in the past:
- Stopping at a very specific point in the targeted tissue, proton therapy is a type of radiation that is proving very effective for fighting many kinds of cancer. Conventional radiation, for example, continues beyond the tumor. In breast cancer proton therapy treatment, this means on average no radiation to the heart and on average 50% less radiation to the lung as compared with conventional radiation.
- Due to proton therapy’s targeted approach, recent studies have found that prostate cancer patients treated using this method have a significantly reduced risk of impotence. In fact, 94% of men report that they remain sexually active after treatment.
- In addition, researchers report that 99%, 94% and 74% of men treated with proton therapy with low-, intermediate-, and high-risk prostate cancer, respectively, have no signs of cancer recurrence after five years of follow-up appointments.
- 34.5% of men who are 20 years and older are obese and 32.6% have high blood pressure or are taking prescriptions for hypertension, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). All of these men with these conditions put themselves at a higher risk for future health problems, including cancer
- One of the best advantage to a proton therapy session is that it generally takes just 15 to 45 minutes. Of this time, however. the actual time spent delivering the protons to the tumor is approximately only one or two minutes.
- At the beginning of the year 2015, more than 30 particle therapy centers, with a total of nearly 80 patient treatment rooms, were under construction across the world.