'The Lance Effect': Does Heat Cure Cancer?

July 25, 2006 — -- Many people have wondered how Lance Armstrong was able to win the Tour de France multiple times after he was treated for testicular cancer that had spread to his lungs and his brain.

As it turns out, medical researchers at Johns Hopkins University have thought about the same thing: Why is testicular cancer so treatable when other forms of cancer are not?

It may simply boil down to temperature, researchers speculate. Testicular cells are more sensitive to heat, and this may offer a clue as to why, even with widespread disease, more than 70 percent of testicular cancer patients survive. Meanwhile, five-year survival rates for people with widespread breast, lung or skin cancers are less than 27 percent, according to statistics from the American Cancer Society.

Testicles are naturally a few degrees cooler than the rest of the body, and when at a normal body temperature, the cells tend to die, said Robert Getzenberg, a cancer researcher and director of urology research at Johns Hopkins University. In a commentary published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Getzenberg explains how heat, or hyperthemia, may be used to treat cancers.

He and two co-authors write that metastatic testicular cancer cells -- or those that have spread beyond the testicle to other parts of the body -- also may be weakened by the body's slightly higher temperature. When weakened, the testicular cancer cells are more readily destroyed by radiation and chemotherapy, they wrote, coining the theory the "Lance Armstrong Effect."

Some oncologists say, however, the researchers ideas do not directly relate to Lance Armstrong and why he survived testicular cancer. After all, Armstrong's treatment for testicular cancer involved chemotherapy and surgery. So, the theory could have been named after any other survivor of testicular cancer as well some said.

Nor is it necessarily a new theory, doctors noted.

"We've known for a long time that heating cancer cells kills them," said Dr. Donald L. Trump, an oncologist and senior vice president of clinical research at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, N.Y.