Radiation therapy often is used to treat cancer patients. Now, doctors at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have shown that radiation therapy -- aimed directly at the heart -- can be used to treat patients with a life-threatening heart rhythm. They treated five patients who had irregular heart rhythms, called ventricular tachycardia, at the School of Medicine.
The patients had not responded to standard treatments and collectively experienced more than 6,500 episodes of ventricular tachycardia in the three months before they were treated with radiation therapy. In ventricular tachycardia, the heart beats exceedingly fast and its chambers often fall out of sync, interfering with blood flow and placing patients at risk of sudden cardiac death. When delivered directly to problematic areas of the heart muscle, the radiation therapy resulted in a dramatic reduction in the…
