Every once and a while somebody will ask me
if it is true that someone should not seek
Hyperbaric Oxygen treatments if they have cancer.
Supposedly the additional oxygen would make the cancer
grow faster.
I could not really answer this question, so I did a little
research and here is one article I came up with:
(Bold print done by me)
"The Issue of Carcinogenesis
An issue that frequently arises when considering a patient for hyperbaric oxygen who also carries a cancer diagnosis is what does HBO2 do to growth or potential recurrence of the malignancy. In a publication from 1994, Feldmeier and his colleagues reviewed the discoverable literature related to this issue. An overwhelming majority of both clinical reports and animal studies reviewed in this paper showed no enhancement of cancer growth.
A small number of reports actually showed a decrease in growth or rates of metastases. In 2001 at the Consensus Conference jointly sponsored by the European Society of Therapeutic Radiology and Oncology (ESTRO) and the European Committee for Hyperbaric Medicine (ECHM), Feldmeier updated this material. In this review, Feldmeier emphasized the differences known in tumor and wound healing angiogenesis. Each has similar but distinctly different processes operational. He showed that there are significant differences between tumors and wounds in the growth and inhibition factors, which modulate angiogenesis. He summarized the literature demonstrating that tumors, which are hypoxic, are less responsive to treatment, less subject to cellular death by apoptosis and more prone to aggressive growth and lethal metastases. Fears that hyperbaric oxygen may promote malignant growth are not supported by scientific evidence, and clinicians should not refuse to consider a patient for hyperbaric oxygen who has had a history of malignancy." 1
1 http://rubicon-foundation.org/dspace/bitstream/123456789/3998/1/15233169.pdf
Page 9
I looked into that very same suggestion about HBOT making cancer grow, back in 2000, when I was looking into HBOT for my wife's whole brain radiation-induced necrosis. I found out also that there is two distinct differences between tumor angiogenesis and wound-healing angiogenesis.
ReplyDeleteI've received numerious emails, over the last ten years, from the loved-ones of patients who received HBOT for radiation-induced necrosis. For those that caught it early enough, it was very successful. For those in end-stage, not.
A number of clinicians have found that Avastin (bevacizumab) may be able to stop radiation necrosis of the brain and allow some of the damage to be reversed. Imagine being able to have radiation necrosis of the brain successfully manage and perhaps even prevented with Avastin or similar drugs?