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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."
I am confused! I thought electrical fields cause brain cancer!
They want their Rife machine back.
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.
Support Eachother, Copy Dutch Property!
The basis of all chemotherapy and the like has constantly focused on the fundamental differences between cancerous cells and normal cells: ie the fact that they're not dividing rapidly.
This is why people who receive chemo have problems with diarrhea and hair loss.. it just so happens that those cells are rapidly dividing and are affected just as well.
However, other treatments (few and far between,) such for Chronic Mylogenous Leukemia using Gleevac, which is designed to target the BCR-ABL fusion protein or Herceptin, used against breast cancers that overexpress ErbB2 receptor, are both novel in the sense that they exploit even more unique features of the cancer. That's what makes them so fantastic.
This new therapy won't provide too many benefits as far as the nastyness of treatment b/c it works just like chemo (in the case of metastases.) However, in the case of solid tumors ie GBM schwannomas, etc. perhaps it could be useful.
By the way, 10 patients is nearly not enough to be conclusive in any respect.
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Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
Great development. Now figure out how to stick an electrode in the right place to solve colorectal cancer - the #2 killer these days.
Most of the stuff on
Not enough O2 and you die. Too much and you die (approx 2 atmospheres partial pressure IIRC).
Water too. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Strange
Most drugs are poisons if taken in excessive quantities too
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The article states that the cells in the brain don't really replicate or regenerate.
t ml
However, recent research has shown that cells in the area of the hippocampus do in fact replicate, and are indicated in the role they play in cancer:
Take a peak:
http://www.biopsychiatry.com/newbraincell/index.h
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Sase
"It's the opposite of that."
I'm not putting high-voltage machinery next to my BRAIN. That'll cause...oh wait.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Bend over.
kurzweil_freak
5th Kyu Genbukan Ninpo/KJJR student
Be the darkness that allows the light to shine.
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.
Now it is shown that "intermediate frequency electrical fields" (whatever that means) can damage cancerous brain cells. Does this mean that a physiological effect (beneficial in this case) has been demonstrated, so that an adverse effect becomes more plausible?
I have no idea of the frequencies and amplitudes involved in the two cases (tumour treating fields vs. cell phones).* I'm guessing that the situations are so different that this result says nothing about the physiological effects of cell-phone exposure, but as the linked article contains no useful information about this, and the paper is unavailable, it is just a guess.
* I've looked for the paper on the PNAS website, but I can't find it - perhaps it is accepted but not yet published.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Oh! But what about the long term effects?
Personally, I am a big fan of homeopathic treatments. Everyone knows that the long term effects of electromagnetic fields are cancers. That's why I say not to use them for treatment! Go for the treatment that will not produce those nasty long term effects!
Homeopathy! Yeah, that's the ticket!
"Low-intensity, intermediate-frequency (100-300 kHz), alternating electric fields, delivered by means of insulated electrodes, were found to have a profound inhibitory effect on the growth rate of a variety of human and rodent tumor cell lines" From: http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/cgi/content/full /64/9/3288
Tim S
The physics geniuses on Slashdot, not to mention the cell phone industry, keep saying that electromagnetic radiation is non-ionizing, so it can't affect the brain!
worst of all is the claims these idiots make, such as being able to diagnose illnesses just by the colour of your eyes. These charlatans usually try backup their nonsense with fake creditals from bogus "medical schools" of natural treatments.
the standard bullshit line is "oh look your eyes have -insert fake medical term- you must be low on -insert random vitamin- you need to buy this $80 bottle of - some product with the phrase natural whatever in it, which is filled with pills containing processed rubbish from china-"
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Now the phone and Wi-Fi industries can tout their offerings as "medical devices" and jack up the selling price. Meanwhile, aluminum futures will crater is it can be "proven" that tin-foil hats block "beneficial" radio frequencies...
The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power. -- Daniel Webster
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
'So how deep does the field penetrate the body? If the answer is not very deep then you couldn't treat stuff like cervical cancer or colon cancer'
My exhaustive study of the Slashdot summary leads me to believe this only being used on brain cancer. The electrical field prevents the cells from dividing and healthy brain cells rarely divide. The implication seems to be that this wouldn't work elsewhere because the cells in other parts of the body divide quite frequently.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Is what concerns me most.
In 2005 I was referred to an ECT (ElectroConvulsive Therapy sometimes called the old term Electroshock) program for treatment of treatment resistent unipolar depression I've had for 13 years. The doctors only told me the legal minimum of possible side effects. I had 30 grand mal seizures, the minimum considered therapeutic. They couldn't do anymore because I was maxxed out on caffeine and my heart was going into irregular rhythms when they'd try to prolong the seizure with more electricity. (Just short of an amp) In other words, the brain doesn't like seizures. ECT has its origins as a form of torture and relies on the use of a side-effect that has an entire disease, epilepsy, that we try to make go away, as its "therapy". They may paint it as less barbaric because they added general anesthesia and muscle relaxant, but its still the same idea. Break the brain to fix it? Add along to that how many anesthesiologists mess up the general and muscle relaxant leaving the patient conscious but paralyzed as the seizure starts, so they feel like they're choking, but can't move or scream. Its hardly humane. I'm not going to link the support sites, because that would seem to give me more of an agenda here then I meant to come off with.
I went into ECT with a very open mind (no pun intended) because frankly I wanted my life back and 5 psych consults were telling me this was my last hope, save the VNS pacemaker that is held up in FDA red-tape and not covered by major insurance providers for TRD yet. I knew I risked some memory damage during the treatment, my life (as with any general anesthesia procedure) and that its terrifying. Well TRD that keeps you bed-ridden is pretty lousy too. Depression kills most of its victims with their own hands. I was living in constant fear of taking my own life. There are things worse than death. I had never had small scale memory loss, or repetative surgery. So I tried ECT.
What I learned was that I wasn't given all the facts, most ECT patients aren't. Almost everyone that finds out I've had ECT thinks I'm kidding. They can't believe such an inhumane procedure is still used. They ask me if its like it was "in that movie with Jack Nicholson movie?" Most of those people that find out are doctors that read my medical history. I carry it in my purse because I have no memory of the majority of the two and a half years before 2005.
I don't understand the jargon in that article. I do understand that physical and emotional suffering of disease will put a patient at risk to fall prey to unethical procedures. I cannot say if some of those will be in the name of research leading to better treatments. I just know that when you have a death sentence, a limited time and the pain is untreatable, ethical treatment of a patient is huge. I'm going to be very careful about letting doctors put electricity into my brain again. I sacrificed memory and vocabulary and now have 2 day long migraines twice a week because someone messed up. Hindsite isn't 20/20 for me, my memory is gone except for the journaling I did. I don't even know if I'd do it again. Thats what I guess I'm thinking people should consider when it comes to letting doctors play god with your mind.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
I should precurse this by saying that I am a medical physicist, irradiating cancer cells is what I do for a living.
Unlike the hype and scaremongering about cell phones, this actually has some science behind it. An article in Cancer Research (2004) (: Cancer Res. 2004 May 1;64(9):3288-95.) desribes the same technique (by the same authors) applied in vitro. This means they took some cancer cells in a test tube and subjected them to the fields. There they saw that over the course of 24 hours there is an inhibition in growth, over several days in tumors implanted in mice a reduction in tumor growth was seen (this means that the tumor grows slower).
Independently, a group in Cleveland investigated the influence of electric fields at very low frequencies (50Hz, yes that's the frequency of our daily AC-current) and found inhibition of cell cycles, (this means that the cell is moving through it's cycle).
To put things into context, we see some inhibition at low frequency (50Hz), and disruption of cell division at 100-300kHz. Cell phones work at frequencies of the horder of GHz. (for you slashdotters, replacing Hz with bytes will tell you all you need to now about the relative values of kHz, MHz and GHz ;-) )
So I am reasonably optimistic that there is some truth to all this. However, there seems to be a selectivity that will not work as an advantage all of the time. The technique only seems to work if the field is switched on during cell mitosis. This means it will only work on cells that are actively replicating. So the it will only work well if and when the cells you are targeting have a different proliferation rate, than the ones you do not want to affect. Of course brain cells are a good example as their replication rate is extremely slow (if any).
Some caveats: The experiment (in vitro) as described, has not been reproduced by an independent group. The number of patients used in the in vivo experiment is very low, too low to distinguish with any significant probability that the results obtained are not merely a statistical effect. The results however are promising. But that is the way science works. Slowly and methodically: FYI there is a specific way things are done when new modalities are found: 1) You look for dose effects, what is the dose that does no harm. This means you take a group of people and give each subsection and ever increasing dose until you see some bad effects. 2) Then perform a study of efficacy giving a large group of people the determined dose and see if there still is an effect, 3) Finally you compare this with a standard of care (the thing you normally do) with your new stuff in a double blind study (which means you, nor the patient knows beforehand what the treatment is going to be and see if you see a different cure rate.
You might say, if it is so good we want it now. I can say the process described above goes faster the bigger the difference is with the standard of care.