Years Ahead

Advanced radiation treatment gives Cancer Center patients hope for a better future

It all happened so unbelievably fast.

On the Friday before Memorial Day 2010, Trish Cartafalsa noticed that her 2-year-old son, Ryan, was having trouble with his balance. Less than a week later, he was having a brain tumor removed at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Like many children with brain tumors, Ryan needed radiation treatment in addition to surgery. His oncologist, Jean B. Belasco, M.D., explained to Trish and her husband, Ben, that Ryan was a good candidate for proton therapy, an advanced form of radiation that had just become available through CHOP's Cancer Center.

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Ryan, 2, is thriving after receiving proton radiation therapy, an advanced treatment now available through CHOP's Cancer Center.

Proton therapy is much more precise than conventional radiation, which can cause short-term side effects like nausea and fatigue as well as longer-term complications like learning difficulties and growth problems. All of these side effects can be especially pronounced in young brain tumor patients, whose cancers often require an extremely high dose of radiation — and whose age makes them more susceptible to radiation's harmful effects.

In fact, for some survivors of childhood brain tumors who receive conventional radiation, "the intellectual impact can be dramatic, affecting all aspects of day-to-day life," says John M. Maris, M.D., chief of the Division of Oncology. With the advent of proton therapy, he adds, "we are very optimistic that major side effects will be substantially reduced and, in some cases, even eliminated."

So far, Ryan's 33 proton therapy treatments haven't slowed him down one bit. "He did really well," says Trish, who kept track of his side effects as part of a research study CHOP is leading. "I felt like every day I was circling, 'He was normal.'"

Located in Penn Medicine's Ruth and Raymond Perelman Center for Advanced Medicine, the 75,000-square-foot Roberts Proton Therapy Center is the first proton facility in the mid- Atlantic region.

The Roberts Center has a child-friendly waiting room just for CHOP patients, and the staff includes physicians, registered nurses, nurse anesthetists, anesthesia technicians and child life specialists from CHOP.

A 220-ton particle accelerator (cyclotron) delivers a high-energy beam of proton radiation to each of the facility's treatment rooms, where it kills cancer cells with extraordinary precision.

Mikayla, 10, was one of the first pediatric patients treated at the Roberts Center.