New RFA Lung Cancer Treatment Increases Survival by 2 Years

A new procedure for treating inoperable Lung Cancer tumors is said to give cancer patients two or more years of life according to a results presented here at the 2008 Society of Interventional Radiology's 33rd Annual Scientific Meeting being held in Washington D.C (March 15-20^th).

The new treatment is known as Radiofrequency ablation (RFA). RFA is a new treatment capable of killing ("cooking" was the exact word used by the presenter) tumors with heat. The RFA treatment is said to improve metastastic inoperable tumors (tumors that can spread to other parts of the body).

The new study presented here was based on 249 lung cancer patients who had lung cancer. Of these 195 had lung metastases and 49 primary non-small cell lung cancer. Survival rates of these patients who received the new Radiofrequency ablation treatment were very similar to that of traditional surgical treatments for lung cancer patients. However, the RFA treatment is said to be less invasive and with less side effects and faster recovery time.

Interesting results were obtained for patients with small cell primary lung cancer. Dr. Thierry de Baere, radiologist with the Institut Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France, said that 85 % of the patients with small cell primary lung cancer who received RFA had no viable lung tumors after one year and seventy-seven percent had no viable lung tumors after two years. However, It was clarified that this results only included RFA treatments on tumors four centimeters in diameter or smaller. This is, according to Thierry de Baere, as giving a 2 more years of life to lung cancer patients.

The American Cancer Society (ACS) has estimated that 15 percent of all new cancer cases in 2007 were lung cancers. This would be approximately 213,380 new cases. Experts believe that lung cancer deaths in the United States are higher than that from breast, prostate and colorectal cancers combined.