Doctors at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital are exploring a new, more precise way of administering radiation therapy to patients with prostate cancer.
Stereotactic ablative body radiotherapy, or SABR, allows doctors to give patients a high dose of radiation in a short period of time, replacing the long hours of treatment commonly associated with radiation therapy.
“What’s really revolutionary about this is that patients used to have to come for up to eight weeks of radiotherapy — one treatment per day, five days a week,” said Sunnybrook oncologist Andrew Loblaw. “Now with this new trial, we’ve been able to show that you can do that as few as five times.”