Freezing Out Breast Cancer

TAMPA, Fla., March 16 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Interventional radiologists have opened the door to an encouraging potential future treatment for the nearly 200,000 women who are diagnosed with breast cancer in the United States each year: image-guided, multiprobe cryotherapy. In the first reported study, researchers were able to successfully freeze breast cancer in patients who refused surgery; the women did not have to undergo surgery after treatment to ensure that tumors had been killed, note researchers at the Society of Interventional Radiology's 35th Annual Scientific Meeting in Tampa, Fla. (Logo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20100127/SIRLOGO ) "Minimally invasive cryotherapy opens the door for a potential new treatment for breast cancer and needs to be further tested. When used for local control and/or potential cure of breast cancer, it provided safe and effective breast conservation with minimal discomfort for a group of women who refused invasive surgery or had a local recurrence and needed additional management," noted Peter J. Littrup, M.D., an interventional radiologist and director of imaging research and image-guided therapy for the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, Mich. "This is the first reported study of successfully freezing breast cancer without having to undergo surgery afterward to prove that it was completely treated," he added.