Letter from the Editor-in-Chief

Dear Colleagues,

It is my pleasure to meet you again with this year’s sixth successfully edited issue of our journal. As I mentioned previously, I am eagerly awaiting the opportunity to meet possibly all our co-editors at the World Congress of Brachytherapy in Vienna, Austria (April 2-4th, 2020).
This issue starts with an invited Letter to the Editor written by Prof. Tomasz Pospieszny from the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland. His interesting summary of Maria Skłodowska-Curie’s input to nuclear physics and her brachytherapy (curietherapy) legacy is really worth reading. Let it be our tribute to Maria on the occasion of her birthday so well celebrated all around the world this November. Dear Professor, thank you for your time, passion, and efforts put into submission of the letter. Dear readers, just enjoy.
One could repeat after Bobby McFerrin “Don’t worry, be HAPPY”. This is what we want for our patients: health and happiness after cure. So, while treating them for cancer, we should also remember about their emotional state. The “HAPPY” Italian group addressed this important issue in their original paper which opens JCB 6/2019. Read and learn what bothers patients most during courses of interventional radiotherapy.
Again from Italy, Andrea Vavassori et al. present the monoinstitutional retrospective results of cervical cancer combined treatment consisting of intensity-modulated radiation therapy (IMRT) and the infrequently reported pulsed-dose-rate (PDR) brachytherapy. Such an approach can be considered an effective treatment for cervical cancer despite the high percentage of locally advanced disease.
Guidelines and recommendations regarding cervical cancer treatment are to be followed worldwide. All focus on the necessity of combining brachytherapy with chemoradiation. The Indian Brachytherapy Society carried out an online survey on patterns of cervical brachytherapy in India and revealed a progressive shift from 2D to 3D image-based parameters for planning and a need for further efforts in the transition to more advanced brachytherapy techniques and treatment planning.
Polish Brachytherapy Society members from Poznań claim that reducing dysphagia with palliative 2D high-dose-rate (HDR) brachytherapy improves survival in esophageal cancer. Survival is prolonged in patients who respond to the treatment, they conclude.
Another original paper from Poland is on the detection of individual prostate...


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