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April 2, 2005. A new study presented at 30th annual meeting of the Society of Interventional showed that Cryotherapy, which is a non-surgical treatment used in many cancer is effective in treating prostate cancer. Cryotherapy is also effective in preserves urinary and sexual function in a majority of, according to the study. This could be called the male equivalent of lumpectomy, which the most common surgical procedure performed for breast cancer in women. Cryotherapy involves freezing of the tissue with extremely cold gas specifically targeting the tumor, which spares the healthy tissue in and around the prostate gland, rather than destroying all of it, as the traditional approaches of radiation therapy and other procedures do.
Prostate tumors are slow growing tumors and up to 35 percent of patients present with solitary and unilateral tumors. Many of them can be treated with a local treatment that pinpoints only the tumor, which is less likely to cause side effects. Sexual dysfunction occurs in 75 percent and urinary incontinence occurs in 10 percent of patients with prostate cancer who undergoes surgery. Patients undergoing brachytherapy, another common treatment using implanted radioactive seed particles, have a 50 percent impotence rate in the long term. Both brachytherapy and surgery treat the whole prostate gland.
"Treating only the tumor instead of the whole prostate gland is a major and profound departure from the current thinking about prostate cancer," said study author Gary Onik, M.D., interventional radiologist at Florida Hospital/Celebration Health, Celebration, Florida, who pioneered prostate cancer cryoablation in the early 1990s. "Focal cryoablation changes the whole picture in terms of complications, and the cancer control is as good as for any other treatment. Focal cryoablation appears to preserve urinary and sexual function superior to any other treatment yet available," said Onik.
This Cryoablation treatment of the whole prostate gland has been approved by Medicare for over five years as a primary treatment for prostate cancer. Recent data show that cryoablation has a 10-year disease-specific survival rate of over 98 percent. Cryoablation is also the only procedure specifically approved by Medicare to treat patients with prostate cancer who have failed radiation therapy.
The following are study highlights
- Total patients 60
- Results available for 42 patients
- Follow up 1 year and eight weeks
- Ninety five percent of patents (40/42) had stable PSA values showing no evidence of cancer
- Potency retention rate 78% (compare with traditional treatment mentioned above)
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