Hey check this out!

It was on an Aussie news site, but talks about a cancer patients body going crazy and producing massive amounts of insulin. He needed heaps of sugar to stay alive, but his weight doubled!

New radiation treatment for Liver Cancer

New radiation treament for liver cancer

A solution which uses technology from the Lucas Heights Reactor is being injected into patients to help fight liver cancer.

Three months ago, Les Bartlett thought he was never going to leave hospital. After fighting liver cancer for two years, the battle seemed lost.

"Well, they called the family in and told them I wouldn't last 48 hours," Mr Bartlett said.

Les had almost doubled in weight to 160kg; the tumours in his liver threw his body's insulin production into overdrive and he needed massive infusions of dextrose or sugar to survive.

"It made me [the] opposite to a diabetic … the insulin would just eat away the sugar and I'd go into a coma," he said.

As a last resort, doctors urged St George Hospital to pay for a revolutionary Australian treatment. Made at the Lucas Heights Reactor, microscopic particles known as selective internal radiation spheres are packed into a solution. When injected into a patient's liver, no matter where the tumours are, the spheres will target them.

Even Les's surgeon is amazed, "The most dramatic thing … on something called the hot scan, we just couldn't see them after they'd been treated so it was very good," said Professor David Morris from St George Hospital.

Professor Morris would like to see the treatment which is saving lives in America and Asia, as more readily available here where it's made.

"This treatment is really proven [to be] valuable in a number of settings and it's awfully expensive and we're really struggling to be able to pay for it," said Professor Morris.

Les and his family are just grateful the hospital persevered. "I'm really lucky," said Les, with a smile.

Both primary and secondary liver cancers have previously been difficult, if not impossible, to treat effectively, as the tumours usually develop internally within the liver and therefore are inaccessible by conventional treatments. Consequently, more than 95% of liver cancer patients will die due to the disease. Chemotherapy and surgery are possible in only a limited number of cases.

Facts on Selective Internal Radiation Therapy


Selective Internal Radiation Therapy (SIRT) is a revolutionary treatment for advanced liver cancer that utilises new technologies designed to deliver radiation directly to the site of tumours.


Conventional radiotherapy can only be applied to limited areas of the body and adversely effects nearby tissues. SIRT, on the other hand, involves the delivery of millions of microscopic radioactive spheres called SIR-Spheres® directly to the site of the liver tumour/s, where they selectively irradiate the tumours.


The targeted nature of SIRT enables doctors to effectively deliver up to 40 times more radiation to the liver tumours than would be possible using conventional radiotherapy. The anti-cancer effect is concentrated in the liver and there is little effect on cancer at other sites such as the lungs or bones.