MONDAY, March 26 (HealthDay News) -- For patients with oligometastatic breast cancer, percutaneous cryoablation (PCA) is well tolerated, with low recurrence and complication rates, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Interventional Radiology, held from March 24 to 29 in San Francisco.
Hyun J. Bang, M.D., from Wayne State University in Detroit, and colleagues assessed complications, local tumor recurrences, and overall survival following computed tomography-guided and/or ultrasound-guided PCA procedures, performed on nine tumors in eight patients with oligometastatic breast cancer. Four, three, and two metastatic lesions were found in liver, lung, and kidney, respectively; each patient underwent a mean of 1.1 PCA procedures.
The researchers found that, during the study, there were no major complications (assessed according to Common Toxicity Criteria for Adverse Events Version 3.0) and no local recurrences. From the time of stage IV diagnosis, the median overall survival was 46 months; the average time from diagnosis of stage IV cancer to PCA was 16 months, and after treatment the average survival was 30 months. The observed five-year survival rate was 25 percent. Before PCA treatment, six of the eight patients had undergone at least one mastectomy.
"This therapy provides a minimal rate of cancer recurrence and no major complications, making these ice balls ideal for targeting metastatic tumors that are limited in number and location," a coauthor of the study said in a statement. "This is a preliminary study, and at this point we're hoping that the evidence could be a stepping stone for a bigger study to look at more patients. If we can get more data that [support] percutaneous cryoablation for metastatic breast cancer, it could be a huge finding."
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