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Taking and holding a deep breath during each radiation beam. For left-sided breast cancer it pulls the heart away from the chest wall and cuts heart dose by about half.
In breath-hold the lungs inflate, the diaphragm drops and the heart moves down and back, away from the breast and chest wall being treated. The beam is only on while surface tracking or a spirometer confirms the patient is at the right breath-hold level. DIBH is now standard for most left breast and many lymphoma and lung treatments, and is one of the main reasons modern breast radiotherapy carries far less long-term heart risk than it did in the 1990s.
Showing the technology this term belongs to: Respiratory motion management (4D-CT, gating, breath-hold, tracking).
Breath-hold for left breast radiotherapy can be delivered without special breathing equipment across ordinary NHS departments, and lowers heart dose in almost everyone selected for it.
The heart benefit of breath-hold is a projection from dose: it rests on the dose-risk relationship measured by Darby and colleagues, not on a trial counting heart attacks in women treated with and without breath-hold.
Shares Respiratory motion management (4D-CT, gating, breath-hold, tracking) and the tags radiation-wave1, precision.
Shares Precision roadmap: margins measured in millimetres → tests that find a target → doses fitted to the person → precision that changes outcomes and the tags radiation-wave1, precision.
Shares the tags radiation-wave1, precision.
Shares the tags radiation-wave1, precision.
Shares the tags radiation-wave1, precision.
Shares the tags radiation-wave1, precision.
Shares HER2-positive breast cancer, Breast cancer (all types), Triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), HR-positive / HER2-negative breast cancer and the tag precision.
Shares Radiotherapy and second cancers: field, dose and age at exposure, Choices made at the time of treatment that change the second cancer risk, Hodgkin lymphoma and the tag radiation-wave1.
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