Live data from Hacker News

Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

spectrum.ieee.org

61–70 of 126 posts

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#61

What are the chances that breaking up a tumor this way seeds cancer elsewhere in the body? 2024 meta analysis of seeding I didn't see ultrasound in there: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39605885/ 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 th…

What are the chances that breaking up a tumor this way seeds cancer elsewhere in the body?

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"

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#62

Due to some family stuff, this is something I've been investigating. My oncologist has said "this will probably be standard care in a few years". The results and studies around this have been excellent. 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 extr…

> When I first learned about this, I thought it was pseudo-science BS. It's crazy what can be done with just sound.

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

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#64

Will this be applicable to belly/visceral fat? It could be wildly popular.

Yes. There are several methods like high-intensity focused ultrasound (UltraShape and Liposonix) and the ultrasonic cavitation found in medspas.

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.

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#65

What are the chances that breaking up a tumor this way seeds cancer elsewhere in the body? 2024 meta analysis of seeding I didn't see ultrasound in there: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39605885/ 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 th…

What are the chances that breaking up a tumor this way seeds cancer elsewhere in the body? 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…

[deleted]

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#66
post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> ... the study found that removing the parachute prior to jumping led to a shocking increase in mortality among skydivers. 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 loos…

The thing about this kind of 'just so' story causal mechanism is that we still have to actually do the science to find out. Your body does filter and kill potentially cancerous cells all the time already. And cancer cells aren't like, some super thing that evolved to kill you specifically. My just-so story goes like this: 'the cancer cells die because they're suddenly outside of the specific bodypart that they were e…

All life, from humans to cells to chromosomes, has only one purpose - to survive. It turns out that reproduction is an effective way to survive. Also, cooperation is an effective way to survive. The cells in our bodies cooperate for survival. Sometimes cells survive better by no longer cooperating, and reproducing as fast as possible. This winds up killing the host, but the cancer cells don't know that.

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.

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#67
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 Seems a little too speculatively worded, IMO.

If it was true, couldn't you get the same effect by taking a biopsy, fragmenting the cells, and injecting them back in? Like a vaccination, in fact. Somebody must have studied that approach already.

There were reports that if you inject the goo from melting the tumor into another mouse, that mouse became much more resistant to that class of tumor[1], so...

[1] - https://news.engin.umich.edu/2023/10/these-bubbles-kill-canc...

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#68
post #49

from purely physics , how is cancer cell different from regular cell to react with ultra/infra? is it so different?

It's not.

The key thing is, one of the things most tumors need to do to get past a certain point is avoid getting caught being tumors.

If you can very selectively cause precise tissue death, from any method, then your body will suddenly start looking askance at any tissue that looks like the secretly-full-of-tumor-markers corpse it just found.

And ultrasonic cavitation means you can, in theory, cause very precise tissue death with even less surrounding effect than radiation.

Re: Ultrasound Cancer Treatment: Sound Waves Fight Tumors

#69

What are the chances that breaking up a tumor this way seeds cancer elsewhere in the body? 2024 meta analysis of seeding I didn't see ultrasound in there: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39605885/ 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 th…

> 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 Seems a little too speculatively worded, IMO.

It's called the abscopal effect; see e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8537037/
Post reply on HN