Radiotherapy may do more harm than good

A team of U.S. researchers has found that in some instances, using radiotherapy to treat skin cancers may be causing more harm than good.As the researchers note, radiotherapy (ionizing radiation) is generally used in half of all skin cancer treatments, despite the fact that it very often does not work out as planned, quite often tumors shrink initially, but then come back even stronger. They suggest their new research offers an explanation of why that is, one aspect of radiotherapy may actually be making it easier for some skin cancer tumors to return and prosper.
The applied radiation causes a suppression of the immune system in the area being targeted. Then, a certain kind of immune cells that are located in the skin, known as Langerhans cells, along with some of the debris brought on by the treatment, migrate to draining lymph nodes, where they cause certain types of T cells to activate. Those T cells, unfortunately, are the kind that tell the immune system to stop attacking, which allows the tumor to grow without having to deal with an immune response.