Healthy is Lifestyle

Brazilian doctors are using a freezing technique to treat bone cancer. Although little used in Brazil, the method was developed in Japan, where it is routinely applied 13 years ago. Works as follows: the doctor cuts the diseased bone, "stripping" the tumor is out, scrape the tumor is inside the bone and have the material for pathological analysis.

Then bone "clean" is dipped into a tank with liquid nitrogen, where it remains for 25 minutes at a temperature of -193 ° C. Thereafter, the bone is removed and dipped in distilled water at room temperature to thaw and be reimplanted in the patient. Freezing kills the diseased cells and healthy.

Conventional treatment of bone cancer typically includes chemotherapy sessions and performing surgery to remove the diseased bone. Once in place, the patient receives a metal prosthesis or bone donor (coming from a bone bank).

"The most common is to use prostheses because there are few bone banks in the country The advantage of freezing is that it uses the patient's own bone, with perfect anatomical fit," said Walter Meohas, an oncologist at the National Cancer Institute (Inca ) and head of oncology at the National Institute of Traumatology and Orthopedics (Into).

Here, for now, few centers know and use the technique of freezing. The pioneer was the orthopedic oncology Marcio Moura, Curitiba, who performed the first surgery of its kind in 2003, the Hospital das Clinicas, Federal University of Parana (UFPR).

Since then he has operated and 67 patients had no recurrence of the tumor in the bone, just had a recurrence in soft tissue. At least 12 of these patients operated for over five years, never had problems again walk normally and therefore are considered cured of bone cancer.