Hi again Eventod,
I'm mildly skeptical about HIFU as I indicated a few minutes ago on your other thread, but that's mainly because I think it still is maturing as a therapy, not because of a fundamental flaw.
I hope you get some replies from those with first hand experience, but most of us also like to know the odds as established by formal medical research that has been published in peer reviewed medical journals, and there's an awesome and simple way to do just that. Here's how to get that information for HIFU.
First, go to "PubMed," www.pubmed.gov, the free public medical research access tool provided by the US Government's National Institutes of Health (NIH) through its National Library of Medicine. We can use that site on this board because it is Government sponsored.
Then enter a search string you think will dig out your results, such as " prostate cancer AND HIFU " (skip the quotation marks). I just did that and got 151 hits!
Then pick the titles that look promising, and for those that have abstracts, click on the blue hypertext list of authors to view a free copy of the abstract. Sometimes you will also be given a free link to the complete paper itself, the link usually offered with green text.
Then proceed to be bewildered and confused
by some of the medical terminology - after all, this stuff is written by and primarily for doctors and medical researchers, but enlightened by enough of the text to make the search worthwhile most of the time.
I've been at this a while now and can probably help explain some of the confusing descriptions and statistics you will encounter.
As a sample, here's the citation and conclusion from one Italian study, hit #8 as of today, which happens to offer a free link to the entire paper. The study involved 25 patients at different risk levels treated between May 2006 to April 2007. That means the followup period for assessing success was quite short. Here it is:
"High Intensity Focused Ultrasound (HIFU): a useful alternative choice in prostate cancer treatment. Preliminary results."
Maestroni U, Ziveri M, Azzolini N, Dinale F, Ziglioli F, Campaniello G, Frattini A, Ferretti S.
Acta Biomed. 2008 Dec;79(3):211-6.
"... CONCLUSIONS: We demonstrated that HIFU represents a useful alternative choice in mini-invasive therapy of prostate cancer. Particularly, results are remarkable in localized (low-intermediate risk) and low morbility prostate cancer. The role of this procedure in high risk patients needs to be further evaluated. Transrectal HIFU represents a mini-invasive therapeutic option that makes the treatment of prostate cancer possible in 84% of cases. Our results agree with the literature data and demonstrate that the success of the procedure depends on the correct indication of treatment and is strictly related to progression risk parameters." (Note that their success was 94% for low-risk cases.)
Take care and hang in there as you cope with the flood of information,
Jim
