Heat Helps Breast Cancer Patients
Published: March 16, 2006
Patients often rely on chemo and radiation to get rid of tumors. Now, there’s a new weapon — heat.
Medical Breakthrough explains how the therapy helps breast cancer patients.
Heat helps breast cancer patients
you use a microwave to heat your food. And now, that same technology may help breast cancer patients live longer.
At Duke University, the hyperthermia, or heat room, is the newest way to treat tumors.
“If you heat tumor cells, then you really enhance cell killing with radiation,” says Dr. Zeljko Vujaskovic, a radiation oncologist at Duke University Medical Center in Durham North Carolina.
As part of a clinical study, researchers give heat therapy to patients before radiation. The breast is placed in a water bath. Microwave energy heats the tissue to about 106 degrees. The heat activates the cells in the tumor — making them more sensitive to radiation.
“You can really make this tumor more oxygenated and then make them more susceptible to cell-killing,” says the doctor.
Patients who had the heat therapy with radiation were nearly three-times more likely to have their tumors go away and stay away.
“How did you tolerate the hyperthermia treatment?” Emma Jean Wilson is asked during treatment.
Her doctor recommended a mastectomy. But, she decided to give the new therapy a try.
“I feel very lucky that I didn’t proceed with the ’standard’ course of treatment,” she says.
Emma’s tumor shrank just a few months after receiving the therapy. Today, she’s cancer-free and recently celebrated at a. Rolling. Stones concert.
“I feel very blessed to be here, and I have received wonderful care,” says Emma Jean.
And now she looks forward to making new memories.
Hyperthermia must be given along with radiation or chemo for it to be effective.
The therapy is also being studied for other types of cancers.
Researchers say the are no side effects except in very rare cases when people have receive burns on their skin.
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