Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States (behind heart disease) and accounts for 21% of all deaths in this country. Those facts are hard to ignore, especially when chances are very high that you’ve been touched by cancer in some way. You may not have cancer yourself, but it’s likely that someone close to you does.
Because cancer is such a widespread issue, scientists are always on the hunt to find new approaches to treatment. As technology advances and more information about cancer is uncovered, the developing alternative treatment options become more promising. And one new groundbreaking technology has brought to light an alternative treatment that, when used following standard treatment protocols (such as surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation), may have the power to make waves in cancer care.
This technology is called histotripsy, and it uses sound waves to treat cancer.
Why Alternative Treatments Are Important
Treatment options such as surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy work wonders for some cancer patients in ridding their bodies of the disease. However, others find that, despite putting their bodies through these extremely challenging treatments, the cancer comes back. And sometimes their bodies cannot endure further bouts of radiation and chemotherapy, leaving them with limited to no options for survival.
This is where alternative treatments that show great promise in trials come into play. Some of the most common and successful alternatives to chemotherapy are:
And recently added to the list is sound wave therapy.
How Sound Waves May Be Able to Treat Cancer
The University of Michigan has spent the last 15 years developing a non-invasive treatment in the form of sound waves that showed great results in trials on rats and, thus, is finally ready to be tested on humans with liver cancer.
This treatment, known as histotripsy, uses focused ultrasound waves to target the tumor tissue. Histotripsy means “crushing of tissue,” and it does just that.
So how does it work?
The sound waves create tiny clouds of gases that exist naturally in human tissue. Those clouds form and break in a matter of microseconds, but in doing so, create a level of pressure that has the power to break apart the tumor tissue at a cellular level.
The doctors performing the procedure can see (via ultrasound imaging) the cancer tissue being destroyed right before their eyes.
Note that this treatment it is intended for people who have not found success with other treatment options or whose cancer has come back following the standard treatment protocol.
Is It Safe?
Because the sound waves are so specifically targeted, there is no damage to surrounding tissue, unlike other cancer treatment options such as chemotherapy and radiation. This is no small thing as many cancer patients suffer greatly from tissue damage resulting from standard treatments.
Many patients have cancerous tumors that are too large, too advanced, have spread throughout the liver or to other parts of the body, or are in a location that makes the entire tumor difficult to get to. Liver cancer is tricky when it comes to treatment because oftentimes it resides close to a large blood vessel that can put the patient at risk of severe bleeding during surgery or post-op.
And that’s where this sound wave treatment really shines.
Researchers found in the rat testing that even with partial tumor destruction (50-75%) via sound waves, this treatment option was still effective.
In fact, 80% of the trials performed on rats showed that the immune system was able to destroy the remainder of the tumor that the sound waves could not directly target. Even better, the tumor did not come back.
This means great promise for halting the cancer cells from regenerating, which also translates into a reduced risk of the cancer metastasizing.
Though histotripsy is currently only being tested in patients with liver cancer, there is hope that this non-invasive approach to cancer treatment may serve as an effective option for those who suffer from other types of cancers.
