Slashdot Mirror
X-rays For Stargazing Turn Into Cancer Treatment
derGoldstein writes "Discovery posted an interesting story of how X-rays that are used by astronomers for determining the various chemical abundances inside stars could also potentially be used for more effective radiation therapy: 'Radiation treatment is a coarse instrument at best, since it destroys surrounding healthy cells as well as cancerous tumors. Much research is underway for targeted methods to reduce the collateral damage and attack just the cancer cells, including embedding nanoparticles inside tumors ... Nahar and Pradham envision a prototype device capable of generating x-rays (gzipped PDF) at the key frequencies to trigger a flood of low-energy electrons in platinum and gold, based on their computer simulations. Gold or platinum nanoparticles would amass naturally in cancerous tumors in the body, and could then be zapped with the focused x-ray beam.'"
This sounds like a neat cure. I wonder how different this is from other targeted focused energy treatment.
Time to offend someone
Summary does not follow from headline. What does mundane x-ray therapy have to do with astronomy? No, I don't want to RTFA for that. You teased it in the headline, re-teased it in the first sentence of the summary, then explained it not. I have to read this summary in a sing-song version of an Australian accent with half my brain removed, while dangling shiny things in front of my face, in order to get the mood it's written in.
Clearly a treatment designed for the rich so they can just say "I'm filled with gold!"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0254058410009041
Another article in Googlespace suggests that gold nanoparticles stay inside blood vessels normally and come out where the vessel is leaky, as happens in tumors.
Are you sure that subluxations aren't somehow involved? You remind me of somebody...
What incentive does the medical industry have to cure it?
The Mayo Clinic got to bill Medicare $1000/injection for my grandmother's weekly shots that were supposed to boost her red blood cells. After six months they couldn't justify it anymore, and turned her over to hospice care. She passed away a week later.
Sure, her doctors meant well, and were practicing the kind of medicine they were trained in...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
I was thinking the same thing.
Gold and platinum will go to the tumor... and liver... and kidneys... etc... so this isn't so perfect either. Further, ionizing heavy metals isn't the same thing as ionizing cancer cells.
A better option is probably something like the gamma knife, where multiple beams are focused to a single point within the tumor. This seems like a cheap and less effective way of evading patent law.
Gold and platinum... does anyone else see the problem here? (Hint: it won't be cheap)
Cash in your tumors now! Tired of those old cancers lingering in your body, trying to kill you and wreck your life? Just zap those tumors with our finely-tuned X-rays, and send the biopsy to us for instant cash. Contact our website, and we'll send you a free postage-paid bio-hazard bag. What could be easier? With the price of gold skyrocketing every day, you'll take up smoking just to get in on this great offer!
They seem to be oblivious to the fact that any benign tissue between the source and target will still be affected by the traversing x-rays.
Kudos to astronomers doing quantum mechanical numerical analysis though. Anil Pradham & Sultana Nahar are wasting their talents peeping into telescopes all day.
I saw a BBC television segment where they showed a Chinese ultrasound machine that is able to focus it's energy and destroy cells by high temperature (in case this x-ray/precious metal offer don't appeal to your treatment preferences).
yes, but when you are finished with the treatment, doctors will tell you, 'You are golden'....
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
>"prototype device capable of generating x-rays (gzipped PDF)"
A file that is actually a PDF (which is already compressed) that is a SINGLE FILE that is tarred but named with "ppt" in it, and stuffed into a useless subdirectory called "FB01" and then gzipped??? Um.... yeesh.
... when tumors infused with gold nanoparticles are the new chic for all the homeboys. Gold teeth are so yesterday, bro!
Prostate seed implants sometimes use an isotope of gold.
...as sodium aurothiomalate (ie, a salt of gold) in the treatment of arthritis. That costs a maximum of £11 per week.
Before there was cancer, it was KNOWN as Consumption:
Consumption is the archaic term for pulmonary tuberculosis, not cancer. Wanker.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. Ending back around Year 2002 I knew a main Loki Entertainment developerJohn Hall (auther of Linux Games porting on Ebay) that felt a lump under his arm and had it checked by a doctor. After this first notice of having contracted cancer in his lymph nodes, he died from THERAPIES within 9 months of being but a couple months before is when tthey used that Gamma Knife on his brain. The surgeries all went fine, scans reported no more cancer, he continued taking the medications they assured onto him, but his lifestyle never changed per his documentation: the cancer kept coming back, and they kept cutting it out and scanning him.
Now there are studies proving that all the scanning causes cancer more than anything else. He documented every drug and surgery down to the shadow and speck of dust, onto his website http://overcode.yak.net/ where he entered a coma and died bu the journal might still be available to you from http://archive.org/ if you are persistent in search. The cancer traveled from his lymphatic system to his brain, where they boasted to excise the cancer using the verry same Gamma Knife that you advocate. How can you advocate what you yourself have't shown to have experienced?
There is more evidence in changing your lifestyle through diet and metabolism as the only way to defeat cancer.
As a PhD candidate who works with noble metal nanoparticles on a daily basis, I have some issues with their work.
1. How do they plan to get the particles to "naturally" accumulate in tumors without some sort of surface coating; specifically one incorporating some sort of tumor sensing molecule?
2. If the nanoparticle is coated with some other molecule, do they still expect "low-energy" electrons to punch through without trouble? How low is "low-energy" anyway? In my experience, when dodecanethiol is attached to a nanoparticle surface (which is very common as a generic molecule for the synthesis work) 200 KeV electrons have no problem punching through, but this coating is much less transparent to a 40-80 KeV electron beam.
3. How well do these particles absorb x-rays anyway? The surface plasmon resonance peak (i.e. the wavelength of EM radiation that it preferentially absorbs) typically occurs in the 300-800 nm range for these (noble metal) nanoparticles. If there isn't a great absorption peak here, how much adjacent tissue are we cooking?
It just seems preliminary to elevate this to "treatment" status when the article really doesn't do much to inspire confidence in the work.