The tumors looked like five large mosquito bites dotting Alison Williams' chest. The cancer that already had cost her breasts was back again, this time in the wall of her chest, an ominously hard-to-treat spot.
Her doctor tried an experiment, beaming microwaves onto Williams' chest to heat it to about 109 degrees. The hope: that the heat would help radiation treatment attack the tumors — and they disappeared.
Scientists have long thought that simple heat could increase the effectiveness of some cancer therapies. But just how much to cook the tumor, and which cancers are susceptible, have stymied the field. Now, backed by tantalizing new evidence, a growing number of studies are enrolling patients in hopes of finally settling whether it's time to turn up the heat.
"We need to keep pushing ahead on this," says Dr. Ellen Jones of Duke University, who recently published research that showed heat significantly helped patients like Williams and has a major study under way to test its effects against cervical cancer as well.
Hyperthermia involves gradually raising the temperature of cancer-riddled tissue to anywhere from 105 to 113 degrees — not enough to burn, but like there's a high fever in that body part. There are different methods: beaming microwaves or ultrasound onto tumors near the skin's surface, inserting probes that emit microwaves or radio waves into the tumor itself or the affected organ, or even using a giant heating machine to raise the entire body temperature.
Here's the quandary: Some studies have found hyperthermia could help certain patients with breast, cervical, head and neck cancers or melanoma. But others show no effect.
Jones, a radiation oncologist, thinks the problem is in consistently getting the tumor's temperature high enough, for long enough.
"The body does not want to be heated. It fights the heating process," agrees William Straube, a physicist at Washington University in St. Louis, which, like Duke, has a major research program on cancer hyperthermia.
| • | More Heat Aids Cancer Therapies
Associated Press, Monday, Sept. 26, 2005 Byline: Lauran Neergaard, AP Medical Writer |
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