Goals and concepts of radiation therapy
This text provides information about the goals and concepts of curative and palliative radio-therapy.
Author: Dr. med. Gesche Riabowol (geb. Tallen), Editor: Ingrid Grüneberg, English Translation: Dr. med. Gesche Riabowol (geb. Tallen), Last modification: 2025/11/26 https://kinderkrebsinfo.de/doi/e211233
In general, radiotherapy is used to achieve the following treatment goals:
- the cure of cancer, i.e. the complete destruction of all malignant cells in the body and the prevention of relapses of the disease (curative radiation therapy)
- to prolong life and alleviate tumour-related symptoms in patients for whom a cure is no longer possible due to too advanced disease (palliative radiation therapy)
Important: Treatment with radiation works differently than chemotherapy: While the latter is effective throughout the patient's body (systemic treatment), radiotherapy is a so-called local treatment. This means that its effects are limited to the irradiated body region (radiation field).
Therefore, another therapeutic goal is to combine the advantages of systemic treatment (chemotherapy) with the benefits of local treatments (surgery, radiotherapy). The use of such combination treatments has helped to significantly increase the cure rates of children and adolescents with cancer in recent decades.
The objective of radiation therapy (curative or palliative) as well as the details of the combination therapy concepts are primarily based on the following individual factors:
- the histological and molecular biological properties of a tumour, as these determine its sensitivity to radiation,
- the tumour location, size and spread (stage of the disease),
- proximity of the tumour to healthy organs.
Radiation therapists carefully weigh up the benefits and risks of radiotherapy individually for each patient, so that the individual therapy components and their combinations are adapted to each patient [TIM2018a].
