Zapping bone brings relief from tumor pain
By Nathan Seppa
From Chicago, Ill., at a meeting of the Radiological Society of North America
By unleashing radio waves inside bone, researchers have stopped intractable pain in people with cancer that has spread to their skeletons.
Tumors that form inside bone when cancers spread can be especially painful. The new technique, called radio-frequency ablation, unleashes energy via a needle inserted into bone to reach the edge of the tumor. The radio waves create intense heat that kills nearby tumor cells within about 10 minutes, says study coauthor Matthew R. Callstrom of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn.