Hybrid treatment prevents woman's cancer
A 40-year-old woman had a combination of treatments involving radiofrequency ablation and minimally invasive surgery to remove nodules from her lungs that could have developed into cancer, Renji Hospital said on Wednesday.
The nodules were found during a checkup and the woman was told they might be in the early stages of cancer.
At Renji Hospital, doctors who conducted CT scans of her lungs suspected only one nodule was at an early stage while the others were pre-cancerous.
Since surgery to remove all the nodules could cause major damage to the lungs, Dr Zhao Xiaojing teamed up with intervention department to develop a combination of treatments.
Doctors used radiofrequency waves to vaporize four nodules while Zhao conducted key-hole surgery to remove the cancerous nodule. It took doctors just three hours to remove all the nodules from the patient’s lungs.
She was discharged three days after surgery with no follow-up treatment required.
“With the development of medical technology, many very tiny lung nodules are identified and more minimally invasive methods are developed and perfected,” Zhao said. “The traditional treatment is surgery. Radiofrequency ablation can be an important therapy for lung nodules apart from surgery. The trial of this hybrid surgery provides new hope for patients, as it can reduce trauma from surgery and solve potential risks of lung cancer.”