Gleneagles Hospitals offers different available treatment options for NPC. Our ENT specialists will evaluate and diagnose your condition in order to accurately prescribe the appropriate course of treatment depending on your stage of NPC and overall health. Treatments may include:
Chemotherapy using one or a combination of toxic drugs that circulate in the bloodstream and kill rapidly growing cells, including healthy ones. It also alleviates the symptoms of NPC.
Neck dissection, if the NPC has spread to neighbouring lymph nodes, in order to remove cancerous lymph nodes, after resection of the primary tumour
Radiation therapy, the most commonly used form of treatment of NPC. This treatment is delivered in different ways:
Brachytherapy, which uses thin metal rods containing radioactive materials to deliver radiation to cancer cells
Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IMRT), a radiation method that allows the precise and computer-guided delivery of radiation beams to kill cancer cells, while sparing surrounding healthy tissues
Radiotherapy or external energy beams can be used to kill cancer cells and alleviate symptoms of NPC.
Surgery to remove nasopharyngeal tumours for the minority of NPC cases that do not respond to radiation therapy