Frying Tumors Can Boost Lung Cancer Survival

By Amanda Gardner
HealthDay Reporter
Monday, March 17, 2008; 1:00 PM

Copyright © 2008 ScoutNews, LLC. All rights reserved.

MONDAY, March 17 (HealthDay News) -- Needle-delivered frying or freezing technologies can be useful weapons against both lung and kidney cancers, new research shows.

In one study conducted in France, patients with advanced lung cancer who were not candidates for surgery underwent a procedure known as radiofrequency ablation (RFA), which basically heats the tumors and kills them.

Seventy percent of the patients with lung metastases or primary non-small cell lung cancer were still alive after two years -- similar to results seen after surgery.

Furthermore, 85 percent of patients with non-small cell primary lung cancer treated with RFA had no viable tumors visible on imaging one year later, while 77 percent had no viable tumors after two years.

"It means that you can actually do a very good job of local control of lung tumors in patients who aren't fit for surgery," said Dr. Damian Dupuy, a professor of diagnostic imaging at Warren Alpert Medical School at Brown University and director of tumor ablation at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence.

"The medical establishment, being very conservative, has always said if you aren't fit for surgery you just basically get chemo and radiation and most of the time [they] don't work well and you die of your tumor. But even the most unfit for surgery can have this procedure safely," Dupuy said.

The Brown researcher was not involved in the French study, but his group completed a lung cancer trial last year with similarly good results.

The new study, led by Dr. Thierry de Baere of Institute Gustave Roussy, in Villejuif, France, was to be presented Monday at the annual meeting of the Society for Interventional Radiology in Washington, D.C.

Lung cancer is the number one cancer killer in the United States and a full 25 percent of patients who have operable disease can't undergo surgery because of co-existing conditions, Dupuy noted.

"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."