Radiotherapy cream

A warm welcome to our online community, thanks for getting in touch with your query. I’m Gemma, one of the cancer information nurse specialists here. We are pleased to see you have already joined our breast cancer forum and hope you are finding it a supportive place to visit.

You will now very likely have had 4 sessions of your radiotherapy for breast cancer, and we hope all is going smoothly for you.

There is some general advice, to help prevent and manage any radiotherapy skin reactions, and your oncology teams may have their own rules to add to this based on professional preferences and individual details about you yourself. So, we would always signpost to check with your own breast care nurse, or radiotherapy review service too.

That said, I appreciate we are replying on a Saturday and hope the following is useful in the meantime:

Radiotherapy affects the way skin renews itself from it’s bottom layer. In effect we ‘wear’ the skin we made 10-14 days ago. For this reason, radiotherapy skin reactions will often be noticed 7-14 days after treatment starts. How severe a skin reaction is can depend on factors such as the type of radiotherapy used, how deep, or superficial the radiotherapy beam is, and individual factors personal to you, some degree of radiation reaction may be unavoidable. However, there are things you can do to help keep any reactions to a minimum. Such as wearing loose cotton clothing and being careful of what products you use.

Your hospital team may have specific products they recommend, but it is usually advised wash with delicate, scent free soap or aqueous cream, patting dry instead of rubbing dry, and using a plain non-scented moisturiser as you suggest yourself. Be careful with baby products, as they can be very highly perfumed, and this can irritate newly forming skin.

Radiotherapy affected skin can be quite fragile and needs a delicate touch, so washing with your fingers is gentler than using a cloth or a sponge. Using a clean towel or flannel to pat dry can protect it as the healing deepens; if you have an older, clean towel you could cut it into smaller pieces to save on the amount of washing you have to do. 

You can read more about the day to day precautions you can take to help minimise the skin reaction from radiotherapy and we have this information about the side effects of radiotherapy in general. It can seem over whelming to read all at once, please remember that not everyone will experience them all, and that some people get very few.

You might like to reach out to one of our specialist Boots Macmillan information pharmacists: They are available online and in store and may be able to suggest a specific product for you.

We are here every day if it might help to chat things over. Please never hesitate to reach out to us.

Our ref: SMJ