Diseases Treated

Lymphoma

The Lymphoma Team provides consultation, treatment and follow-up services for patients with Hodgkin's disease, non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and other hematological malignancies in which radiation therapy is part of the treatment program. Patients are seen and evaluated at the Department of Radiation Oncology Outpatient Clinic at Brigham and Women's Hospital, and also in the Lymphoma Clinic at Dana-Farber. Long-term survivors of lymphoma are seen both at our department and also through the Adult Lance Armstrong Survivorship Clinic at Dana-Farber. All patients are managed through a multi-disciplinary approach, in which the radiation oncologists, medical oncologists, nurses, social workers, physicists, dosimetrists and radiation therapists work together to provide comprehensive oncologic patient care.

Our department offers state-of-the-art radiation planning and treatment facilities. Conformal radiation therapy, which allows accurate tumor targeting while limiting dose to the surrounding normal structures, is important in the treatment of lymphoma patients, since relatively large radiation fields are typically used, and patients are frequently pre-treated with chemotherapy that may have overlapping toxicities with the radiation therapy. Intensity modulated radiation therapy, which combines several intensity-modulated fields coming from different beam directions to a custom tailored radiation dose, is used in selected cases (e.g. re-treatment or tumor in close proximity to dose-limiting structures). Most of our patients undergo Positron Emission Tomography (PET) for staging, and where appropriate, the PET images are directly used to aid in the treatment-planning process.

We work closely with the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute Stem Cell Transplant Team in the care of patients undergoing high dose therapy. We offer local radiation therapy in selected cases, and provide total body irradiation as part of the conditioning regimen for the transplantation. We are the only center in the country with a double-headed linear accelerator that is dedicated for delivering total body irradiation.