Posted on 12/01/2022 3:15:46 PM PST by ConservativeMind
For patients with early-stage renal cell carcinomas (RCCs) that measure between 3 and 4 centimeters, a procedure that destroys the cancer by freezing—called cryoablation—yields a lower-risk of cancer-related death compared to heat-based thermal ablation, reports a study.
Renal cell carcinoma is the most common type of kidney cancer. For patients with early-stage RCCs smaller than 4 cm, an increasingly popular treatment option is destroying the cancer by freezing it or heating it. For these clinical stage T1a RCCs, this cancer-destroying procedure, called ablation, can provide high survival rates without the need for more extensive kidney surgery.
However, the outcomes of ablation appear "less favorable" for a subset of patients with clinical stage T1a RCCs: those whose tumors are between 3 and 4 cm in size.
Eight years after treatment, estimated cancer-specific mortality among patients with RCCs measuring 3 to 4 cm was 8.5% for patients treated with cryoablation versus 12.9% for those undergoing heat-based thermal ablation. With both treatments, about 40% of patients died from causes other than cancer.
After adjustment for non-cancer-related death and other characteristics, patients undergoing heat-based thermal ablation for RCCs between 3 and 4 cm were twice as likely to die of kidney cancer. In contrast, for patients with cancers smaller than 3 cm, estimated cancer-specific mortality was similar between groups: 6.8% after cryoablation and 6.1% after heat-based thermal ablation.
The study is one of the first to directly compare clinical outcomes for freezing versus heating in patients with stage T1a RCCs measuring between 3 and 4 cm. The results suggest heat-based thermal ablation has "a highly statistically significant and clinically meaningful" disadvantage in terms of the long-term risk of death from kidney cancer, compared to cryoablation.
"Conversely, in patients with tumor size 3 centimeters or smaller, either ablation technique is equally valid," says Dr. Sorce.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
How can they selectively freeze the tumor inside kidney without affecting the kidney function or damaging it?
I read that the Israelis are already using this approach.
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