For Patients
All you want to know about the FURTHER Project
Bone metastases
What are bone metastases, and how can we treat them?
What is MR-HIFU?
Find out what it is, and if the treatment is right for you.
Pain relief
MR-HIFU treatment can reduce pain for patients with bone metastases.
Bone metastases are metastases of cancer in the bones. A metastases is a cancerous growth that has spread from one part of the body to another. For patients in later stage cancer, the cancer can spread from its original location (such as the breast or the lungs), and metastasize (develop) in another location, such as the bones.
Bone metastases are common in prostate cancer, breast cancer and lung cancer, but they can occur in almost all cancers. The bones most often affected by cancer cells are the vertebrae (spine), the pelvis, the long leg bones and the ribs. Bone metastases can be painless, but sometimes they can cause a lot of pain. Currently, primary options for treatment of painful bone metastases include radiation and pain medication. In some cases surgery is considered. However, this cancer induced bone pain is often difficult to treat with existing treatments. That is why research is being done into new or additional treatments for pain caused by bone metastases.
For certain patients, focused ultrasound could provide an alternative to conventional therapy. It is a noninvasive treatment that allows for a quick return to normal life (usually the next day). A single therapy session can provide rapid and durable resolution of bone metastasis pain, and focused ultrasound pain relief does not have the adverse side effects of pain medications. It can also be repeated, if the pain should return.
Did you know?
Incorrectly, metastases in the bones are often called bone cancer. This only occurs when the cancer originated in the bone and that is very rare. In bone metastases, the cancer does not originate in the bone itself but comes from a different place in the body where cancer originated.
The treatment that is investigated in the FURTHER project is called MR-HIFU. MR-HIFU is an abbreviation for: MRI guided HIgh Intensity Focussed Ultrasound.
How does MR-HIFU work?
MR-HIFU uses ultrasound waves. We already use ultrasound waves technology in medicine. One example is for making an ultrasound image of an unborn baby. In MR-HIFU, the ultrasound waves that are used in HIFU are much, much stronger than the sound waves used during a pregnancy ultrasound . By bundling these sound waves together and increasing their frequency, tissue can be heated. This is comparable to the bundling of sun rays with a magnifying glass to start a fire. MR-HIFU can reduce the pain caused by bone metastasis by heating and destroying the tissue that causes the pain at the site of the bone metastasis.
The goal of the MR-HIFU treatment is to alleviate the pain that is caused by bone metastases, and therefore improve the quality of life of cancer patients that are limited in their functioning due to painful bone metastases. Treatment with MR-HIFU has already been tested in patients whose standard radiation did not provide pain relief. In these previous studies, MR-HIFU treatment did provide pain relief for 7 out of 10 people. In the current study, we want to demonstrate that MR-HIFU also works well in patients who have not been previously irradiated, or where the MR-HIFU treatment is applied in the short term after the radiation. We want to investigate this by comparing pain scores from patients treated with ultrasound treatment with pain scores from patients treated with standard radiation.
