Cooking Cancers

Cancer specialists have been attacking the killer disease with an ever widening variety of treatments. These include traditional surgery, X rays, drugs and radioactive elements--or combinations of them. This week doctors at Brooklyn's Veterans Administration Hospital reported initial success with a new weapon in the anticancer arsenal: high-frequency radio waves. By using the waves to heat cancerous tissue, they said, they had destroyed or shrunk malignant tumors in 21 cancer patients.

Writing in JAMA, the Journal of the American Medical Association, Dr. Harry H. LeVeen and his colleagues explained that their experiments depended on a significant difference between ordinary tissue and tumors. Because most tumors lack a fully developed network of blood vessels, blood flows much more sluggishly through them than through normal tissue, and heat is not so quickly transported out. Thus tumors are far more susceptible to heat. At high enough temperatures, the malignant cells are killed.

For his experiments, LeVeen, a surgeon who also teaches at Brooklyn's Downstate Medical Center, employed radio-frequency generators that operated at 13.56 megahertz, in the frequency range used by short-wave broadcasters. The signals were sent into the body by electrodes or other devices attached directly to the skin immediately above the tumors. The doses, lasting up to 30 minutes, never exceeded 25 watts--the power drawn by a small light bulb--per square inch. The lightly sedated patients generally felt no pain and did not suffer serious damage to skin or other tissue. Nonetheless, the radiation was strong enough to raise the temperature of the tumors ten to 20 degrees above the surrounding tissue.

In six cases of lung cancer, the treatments produced extensive destruction of malignant cells and noticeably improved the condition of the patients; four of them are still alive. In one cancer victim with an abdominal tumor six inches in diameter, the growth was shrunk to only 1 1/2 inches; five months after it was removed, there was no detectable regrowth. One of the most impressive cases involved a patient with a cancerous kidney. Except for a small portion that had apparently been missed by the radio field, the entire tumor was destroyed.

LeVeen and his colleagues are understandably excited by their technique. In conjunction with other treatments like immunotherapy (TIME cover, March 19, 1973), it could provide a promising new weapon against substantial-sized tumors; it would not be effective against leukemia and other cancers involving widely dispersed malignancies. LeVeen also agrees with the authors of an accompanying editorial in JAMA, Drs. Joan M. Bull and Paul B. Chretien of the National Cancer Institute, who urge additional tests on patients--with special attention directed toward any adverse side effects--before wide-scale application of heat therapy in cancer treatment. Such trials are now being planned at several VA hospitals.

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