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Electrical Field Treats Brain Cancer
amigoro writes "A device that specifically targets rapidly growing cancer cells with intermediate frequency electrical fields doubled the survival rates of patients with brain cancer, according to an article apperaring in PNAS. The device uses electrical fields to disrupt tumor growth by interfering with cell division of cancerous cells, causing them to stop proliferating and die off instead of dividing and growing. Healthy brain cells rarely divide and have different electrical properties than cancerous brain cells. This allows the device to target cancer cells without affecting the healthy cells. Essentially no device-related side effects were seenin the clinical trial."
this is an interesting application- for a long time it has been known that cancer has drastically different biochemistry [clearly seen on some MRI scans] so it stands to reason they might also have odd electrical properties as well. since the treatment is confined to the immediate area near electrods placed on the skin of the scull any other effects would be limited to that area as well.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
I thought this was already claimed by George Lakhovsky, Nikola Tesla and Royal Raymond Rife. Called Resonance Therapy.
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But is that how it works? are electrodes applied to the skin and only the cells in the immediate vicinity are affected?
Yes, in the current iteration it seems that it delivers electric fields directly through the scalp:
http://www.novocuretrial.com/science.html
The NovoTTF-100A device used in this trial delivers very low intensity, alternating electric fields to the tumor site through the scalp.
If the answer is not very deep then you couldn't treat stuff like cervical cancer or colon cancer, because you can't stick electrodes (comfortably?) onto those body parts. If its a big field, however, that you slide the person into (like an MRI) with a deep-penetrating field, it'd make more sense.
I'm wondering if transcranial magnetic stimulation (a technique I work with, but in a very different context) could be useful in non-invasively delivering such a field. It's effective depth is only a couple of centimeters max (unless somebody's using an experimental Deep TMS system), but it might be better than scalp electrodes. It would be impossible to get it to run continuously at the 100-300kHz rate that their 2004 journal paper says is needed, but it's possible that single rapidly-changing pulses at a slower rate could have the desired effect.
1) I have been battling cancer for three years; I'm pretty familiar with the methods and mechanisms of treatment.
2) I've read that it's a myth that cancer cells divide more quickly than healthy cells. The defect is that they continue dividing when they should sense that it's time to stop dividing. It's a matter of duration rather than rate.
3) There are many different kinds of chemotherapy. Some make hair fall out, some cause diarrhea, some cause nausea, some damage skin, some make nerves go whacky. I've had all of those side effects from one drug or another. There are BIG differences between chemotherapies which must mean there are differences in their effect on cells.
4) Brain cancers are particulary troublesome because many drugs can't crossing the blood-brain barrier. Electromagnetism could be very useful where chemotherapy is ineffective.
5) Immunotherapy can be useful at slowing tumor growth or making cancer cells more susceptible to chemotherapy. But immunotherapy alone often isn't enough, and immunotherapy can have very nasty side effects. I suffered much pain and scarring from Erbitux, a drug that blocks epithelial growth factor, but it didn't do a lick of good for my colon cancer.
6) A trial on ten patients won't be the basis for widespread application of this method. But positive results in a human trial is far ahead of many of the supposed breakthroughs that we read about on Slashdot.
AlpineR
If the answer is not very deep then you couldn't treat stuff like cervical cancer or colon cancer, because you can't stick electrodes (comfortably?) onto those body parts.
It's not comfortable, but it's nicer than dying. It's called brachytherapy.
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Taken from the US Clinical Trials Site:e r=2
http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct/show/NCT00379470?ord
"Since they change direction very rapidly (200 thousand times a second), they do not cause muscles to twitch, nor do they have any effects on other electrically activated tissues in the body (brain, nerves and heart). Since the intensities of TTFields in the body are very low, they do not cause heating."
->So it appears to be low intensity EM radiation at approximately 200 kHz.
"Due to the unique geometric shape of cancer cells when they are multiplying, TTFields cause the building blocks of these cells to move and pile up in such a way that the cells physically explode."
->To me it sounds like a rather localized effect requiring significant tuning to see any effect meaning that you're still safe to use your cell phone and can save the tinfoil for BBQing.
There is a lot of fuss about whether cell phones, wi-fi etc. can damage bodies and minds by their radio waves. Although there is a lot of fuss, it is not justified by much (any?) significant scientific data.
The full article has great references which show biological effects. At least one of these articles is available in full as a pdf. They report repeatable experiments and show relationships to frequency and intensity.
The disturbing part is that so much quack noise has been made about cell phone and wifi "radiation" that muddies the watter when so much useful information has been available since the 80's. It stinks that so much of society's resources were devoted to propagating noise when so much signal was available. This represents a complete failure of public education and broadcast media. At best, the failure is one of incompetence. At worst, it's intentional like the tobacco industry. Either way, the barriers must come down.
People who want to own ideas and publications are evil. Most research is publically supported and the public deserves the knowledge.
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