Posted by rbanffy 11 hours ago
Here is a study on AEs specifically from this type of ultrasound: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
Quote: "Cavitation detaches cancer cells/emboli from the primary site and thereby releases them into the circulation, leading to metastasis"
Welp I put it to you like this - if you DON'T use this then you have a gorillion cancer cells among which very likely one genetically predisposed to adventure throughout the body as turbocancer.
If you use this, or radiotherapy, or whatever, presumably there is just a lump of dead tissue where the cancer was, signifying at best you cured it but at worst, knocked it down - specifically if you knocked it down from a gorillion to a million cells, genereally speaking if the body has been seeded or the tumor persists - the tumor will take longer to rebuild back up where it was. The latter is manifested as another such and such months of life, making the therapy "life extending"
And with that said, these studies are more relevant than the top of thread linking to a review from 2011 looking at papers from 2005-2006 for ultrasound cavitation causing metastases.
When there's a clear causal mechanism, additional research that doesn't propose a clear resolution to the underlying problem doesn't negate the clear causal mechanism. Releasing a bunch of loose cancer into the body is a clear causal mechanism, so unless you're filtering it or killing the loose cancer somehow, I'm not sure what those studies could tell you that overcomes the underlying problem. And until they address that problem, it's going to be limited to a quality of life type application - stopping the tumor from killing you now with the certainty of metastasis killing you later.
And so humans evolve to enforce better cooperation among the cells.
So, no, cancer cells did not evolve to kill you. They do evolve for short term gain, however.
It's an endless struggle.
It's not unlike the struggle between civilized people and criminals.
https://www.fusfoundation.org/posts/transformational-milesto...
that's discussed in the article
In theory, this may mean that metastisizing this tumour could destroy it in the pancreas, but allow the cells to spread to more treatable locations?
1 - https://www.canceraustralia.gov.au/cancer-types/pancreatic-c...
If any medical professional could give answers that would be neat.
Seems a little too speculatively worded, IMO.
[1] - https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/10/these-bubbles-kill-canc...
Part of the freak-out about the Trump admin's attacking of scientific research (including, especially, of mRNA research) earlier in the year is that it threatened these trials.
I'm excited to see this option become more broadly available. The ability to precisely target and illicit an inflammatory response is impressive, and Whipples are no joke.
> Histotripsy generally seems to stimulate an immune response, helping the body attack cancer cells that weren’t targeted directly by ultrasound. The mechanical destruction of tumors likely leaves behind recognizable traces of cancer proteins that help the immune system learn to identify and destroy similar cells elsewhere in the body, explains Wood. Researchers are now exploring ways to pair histotripsy with immunotherapy to amplify that effect.
Best wishes!
https://www.mdanderson.org/cancerwise/histotripsy-for-liver-...
Assuming the costs of the precise powerful machines needed are not too high (this isn't anything like MRI), it could be a therapy for almost any kind of cancer tumor, and even small potential/pre-cancer tumors that are safe to remove without bothering to do a diagnosis.
What this does better than pretty much anything else is it isolates the destruction of cells to just the target. The liver is a VERY "bleedy" organ. It has a ton of blood that flows through it which makes surgery extra hard. In fact, the not this surgery that's next best for our circumstances laparoscopic through the arteries to drop a radioactive pellet in the center of the cancer.
The non-invasive nature of this is going to be very good for the future of cancer treatment. Minimizing scaring and damage to tissue is the number 1 factor to better results.
The only reason my local oncologist does not have this machine is they are still pretty pricey.
When I first learned about this, I thought it was pseudo-science BS. It's crazy what can be done with just sound.
I'm curious how they do the alignment with the histotripsy machine. I would think that they could obviously do an ultrasound scan to get the gross alignment correct. But perhaps there is a CT scan afterwards that lets them make the fine alignment. It probably also helps that the liver is a much larger gland so aiming is less critical?
I think we were all thinking that. Acoustic Cavitation has also been proposed as a mechanism for enabling cold fusion. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.1067589
The former is somewhat effective but based on early research shares the same problems as other active fat loss treatments: lysing the fat cells causes all the relevant hormones to get released into the bloodstream, causing reabsorption by other fat cells. It’s a very gradual process and quite expensive.