Cancer

Laser therapy improves cancer diagnosis

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A research team at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has found that laser treatment designed to destroy the tumor can add an average of two months to a patient’s life, compared with chemotherapy, the standard treatment for glioblastomas that have recurred.
Most people diagnosed with glioblastoma undergo surgery that involves removing part of the skull to cut out the tumor, followed by both chemotherapy and radiation. But the tumor inevitably comes back, and a repeat operation is considered too expensive for many patients.Patients are more fragile than they were during the first operation, their wounds may not tolerate reoperation well. It can take four to eight weeks to recover from brain surgery.  Some tumors are located deep in the brain and cannot be removed surgically without risking serious brain damage.

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Instead of surgery, doctors treat recurrent or inoperable tumors with chemotherapy or a heat therapy known as laser interstitial thermal therapy (LITT). Neurosurgeons drill a tiny hole in the skull and insert a laser, guiding it through the  brain to the tumor on a path designed to cause the least damage. The laser emits pulses of heat that kill the surrounding tumor cells in the brain.

Patients with recurrent disease lived an average of  eleven months after receiving  laser therapy. Other studies have found that treatment with the chemotherapy drugs bevacizumab or temozolomide typically extends glioblastoma patients about nine months.

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