A study conducted in France on patients with advanced lung cancer, who were unable to undergo surgery but were able to undergo a procedure known as radio-frequency ablation (RFA), shows that 75 percent of the patients with lung metastases or primary non-small cell lung cancer were still alive after two years. Eighty-five percent of patients with non-small cell primary lung cancer treated with RFA had no viable tumors visible on imaging one year later, and 77 percent had no viable tumors after two years.

The procedure, known as freezing or frying, basically heats the tumors and kills them. Dr. Damian Dupuy, a professor of diagnostic imaging at Brown University and director of tumor ablation at Rhode Island Hospital, Providence, RI explained that the procedure means that local control of lung tumors in patients who aren't fit for surgery is possible.

Dupuy said that even the most unfit patients can have this procedure safely. The Brown researcher was not involved in the French study, but his group did complete a lung cancer trial last year with similarly good results.

Dr. Therry de Baere, of Institute Gustave Roussy, Villejuif, France led the new study that was presented at the annual meeting of Society for Interventional Radiology in Washington, D.C. He said that the procedure is done at almost every hospital that has an interventional radiologist and is like a lung biopsy. He noted that most patients go home the same day.

Two other studies presented at the meeting used cryoablation to successfully freeze and kill kidney cancer tumors.

Dr. Christos S. Georgiades, lead author of one of the studies and an an assistant professor of radiology and surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore said that a probe is inserted into the tumor and the central volume of the tissue is frozen with temperatures close to negative 150 degrees centigrade. Patients don't feel the cold.

In this study, the procedure was 95 percent effective for tumors four centimeters or smaller and almost 90 percent effective in tumors up to seven centimeters in diameter after one year. He noted that these percentages were reported in patients with disease that had not yet spread beyond the kidney.

Another study, by the Barbara Ann Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit, looked at tumors treated with cryoablation whose average size was 2.8 centimeters. This team found that after 1.3 years, most of the tumors still came up on imaging as dead tissue.

For more on these and other procedures, visit the Society of Interventional Radiology.

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