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Frying Tumors Can Boost Lung Cancer Survival
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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 "This is a huge advance for them," he said. "This procedure is done at almost every hospital that has an interventional radiologist, which is most. It's like a lung biopsy."
"If you have to stick a needle in to diagnose lung cancer anyway, why not do it in a single sitting?" Dupuy asked.
Most patients go home the same day, he noted. According to Dupuy, the procedure may also hold promise for pain relief in patients who are dying.
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Two other studies presented at the meeting used the other end of the temperature spectrum -- cryoablation -- to successfully freeze and kill kidney cancer tumors.
"This is a minimally invasive, non-surgical cancer treatment without an incision, explained Dr. Christos S. Georgiades, lead author of one of the studies and an assistant professor of radiology and surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. "You put a probe, which is basically a needle, into the tumor, freeze the central volume of the tissue with temperatures close to negative 150 degrees centigrade. The patients don't feel the cold."
In Georgiades' study, the procedure was 95 percent effective for tumors 4 centimeters or smaller and almost 90 percent effective in tumors up to 7 centimeters in diameter after one year. This was in patients with disease that had not yet spread beyond the kidney, he noted.
"The technique has been around for a few years, but we're only now proving that it works," Georgiades said. "Patients have recovery close to that of surgery and many do not have to have surgery. Many procedures are done on an outpatient basis."
The third study, from the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, looked at tumors treated with cryoablation whose average size was 2.8 centimeters. After 1.3 years, most of the tumors still came up on imaging as dead tissue, the team found.
More information
For more on these and other procedures, visit the Society of Interventional Radiologists.
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Copyright © 2008 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.
Last updated 3/17/2008
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SOURCES: Christos S. Georgiades M.D. Ph.D., assistant professor, radiology and surgery, Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore; Damian Dupuy, M.D., professor, diagnostic imaging, Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University, and director, tumor ablation, Rhode Island Hospital, Providence; March 17, 2008, presentations, annual meeting, Society of Interventional Radiology, Washington, D.C.
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