Breast Cancer Study Turns to Noninvasive Surgery
W A S H I N G T O N, Oct. 30 -- Vicki Freeman lay perfectly still inside atube-like machine as ultrasound waves beamed deep into hercancerous breast. Little bursts of heat signaled the beams werecooking her tumor to death — without a mark or cut to her skin.
Freeman is one of the first women to try a novel medicalexperiment to see if this “focused ultrasound therapy” might oneday offer a noninvasive alternative to breast cancer surgery.
It will take years of study to prove whether cooking tumorsworks. But as women already clamor for less disfiguring breastsurgery, pilot experiments at Houston’s M.D. Anderson Cancer Centerand Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital signal the latest in agrowing trend: research on ways to make cancer removal not justless invasive, but to quit cutting patients altogether.
“If you think about surgery, it’s sort of medieval,” says Dr.Darrell Smith, a Harvard University radiologist conducting Brigham& Women’s study. “We’re trying to get more elegant in the way wedo this. It’s kind of Star Trek in a way.”
Minimal Tumor Removal?
Yet it raises a serious safety question: Are doctors trying tomake tumor removal too minimal, particularly for diseases likebreast cancer where surgery can work very well? After all,scientists already know that some younger women undergoinglumpectomies get too little tissue cut out for cosmetic reasons,leaving them more vulnerable to cancer’s return than if they hadproperly sized lumpectomies. Plus, if nonsurgical methods do provesafe, they’ll require more complicated machinery — and thus will bemore expensive — than a simple lumpectomy.
But some radiologists insist noninvasive technologies shouldeliminate just as much tumor as a surgeon’s knife. A small Harvardstudy, to be unveiled at a radiology meeting next month, suggestsfocused ultrasound can successfully cook away benign breast tumorscalled fibroadenomas, bolstering hopes for the new cancerexperiments.
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