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Once a breakthrough medical procedure for brain cancer
patients, it's now a breakthrough procedure
for almost all cancer patients.
It's called the CyberKnife.
Fox5 first told you about it back in 2002.
Back then its use was limited, but as Fox5 Shawn
Yancy reports tonight, doctors are now hopeful
it could help fight all cancers.
64-year-old Roberta Juchnewicz is no stranger
to lung cancer.
In fact, this is her second bout with the disease.
Four years ago she was treated with traditional
radiation and chemotherapy and the side effects took
a lot out of her.
Fatigue, extreme fatigue. But I didn't get sick.
I did gain weight, a lot of fluid.
Um, I haven't lost anything.
(Laughing). Roberta did beat lung cancer
once, but after many years of smoking, it may have
caused her second round of lung cancer.
It was long and tedious.
It was 6 weeks of radiation every day and it doesn't
take as long of a treatment, but it does take, ah, an
awful lot of time out of your life.
Time is one thing Roberta hopes not to lose any more
of.
I need all I can get (laughing), as far as lung
tissue goes.
She went to Georgetown University and met
Dr. Brian Collins who introduced her to the
CyberKnife,
a state of the art technique that uses super concentrated
doses of radiation to treat the tumor.
What happens with um, compared to conventional
radiation where the tumors shrink over a very long
period, when we get these large treatments using
a very fine radiation device like the CyberKnife, what
happens the tumors shrink quickly, um, and have an
excellent response.
The CyberKnife uses pinpoint accuracy to attack the
tumor, much better than conventional radiation
or chemotherapy that can at times do more harm than
good.
Now radiation is very effective for treating
tumors.
However, the normal tissue in the body doesn't tolerate
it well.
Typically when we make the decision to treat
somebody with radiation, we're making the decision
to, um, attack a tumor, but we understand that
we're going to harm the patient to some degree.
A typical chemotherapy treatment uses 2 to 6 long
wide doses of radiation.
The CyberKnife uses as many as 160 pinpoint doses
of radiation.
The result; cancer-free in 6 weeks to 3 months.
Good news for Roberta.
This would be losing just a little more than
the tumor tissue and the other way would lose an
entire lobe.
And soon she'll back in the pool swimming towards
her next birthday.
For Fox 5 On Call, I'm Shawn Yancy.
Um, pretty incredible.
Well there are also fewer visits to the hospital
with CyberKnife.
It requires just 3 treatments over a 6 week
period and each treatment lasts 1-1/2 hours.