Freezing a viable prostate therapy
Freezing the prostate to kill cancer, a procedure called cryotherapy, may be as effective as more common treatments such as radiation, U.S. researchers report in the first such follow-up study spanning 10 years.
In this procedure, thin needles are placed into the prostate through which supercooled argon gas is circulated. The technique freezes the prostate, killing the cancer it contains.
But the method remains controversial, and is the least-used method for treating prostate cancer in the United States.
“One of the reasons cryotherapy is controversial is we didn’t know the long-term results,” said study co-author Dr. Ralph Miller, director of the prostate center at the Allegheny General Hospital in Pittsburgh. “It really takes 10 years of good follow-up before you can tell how well a treatment works, because prostate cancer typically grows slowly.”
The 10-year follow-up study is the first of its kind, Miller noted. It found that clinical outcomes “are basically the same as seed implant radiation and external radiation therapy, the other minimally invasive therapies.”
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Brain cramps affect 1 in 5 over 70
More than one-fifth of Americans over age 70 have some memory impairment not classified as dementia, a study finds.
While an estimated 3.5 million Americans suffer from dementia, another 5.4 million over age 70 have some memory loss that affects their lifestyle but isn’t severe enough to limit their ability to function normally, the study authors said.
Previous studies hadn’t been able to estimate a figure, said lead researcher Brenda Plassman, an associate research professor of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine.
The researchers found that 22 percent of the participants had some form of memory loss that didn’t reach the threshold for dementia. Among these people, about 24 percent had chronic health problems such as diabetes or heart disease that may have been the cause of their cognitive impairment.
“The people with cognitive impairment without dementia were at higher risk of progressing to dementia within a year or so,” Plassman said. “We estimated that people with cognitive impairment without dementia progressed to dementia at about the rate of 12 percent a year.”
“However, during the same time period, about 20 percent reverted back to normal cognition,” Plassman said. “That’s important, because these numbers are rather startling, and we don’t want to give the impression that there’s not hope out there.”
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Thermal techniques zap tumors
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 surgical results.
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.
