Although treatment advances have given men a much better chance of fighting prostate cancer, side effects remain a major obstacle for survivors. Incontinence and sexual dysfunction are the most common complaints from men who have undergone standard therapy, which involves treating the whole prostate with either radiotherapy or surgery.

But a new study published in Lancet Oncology shows significant side-effect reductions in prostate cancer patients using an experimental treatment known as high-intensity focused ultrasound.

Results suggest that men have a nine in ten chance of achieving excellent clinical results at 12 months with improved sexual function, no urine leakage and no imaging evidence of the disease using the technique.
"This is a way of treating the cancer without destroying the normal tissue surrounding the cancer," says Mark Schoenberg, chief medical officer for US HIFU, a health care company that's pioneering HIFU technologies.

Investigators used this technique to deliver something called focal therapy. HIFU destroys cancerous tissue with rapid heat elevation by concentrating high-frequency ultrasound waves into an area of tissue the size of a pea. The temperature rises rapidly to 90 degrees Celsius at the location and can be repeated, if necessary.

"Because it has ultrasound technology, it can deliver that energy at a specific location and also see where it's going," says Schoenberg.

Image guided therapy is commonly used to treat cases of breast cancer and kidney cancer. As for prostate cancer, Schoenberg says "this is a new way to think about treating the disease."

42 men between the ages of 45-80 with low to high-risk localized prostate cancer participated in the study.

Results provide support for initiating a larger-scale trail to validate these initial findings and examine the effect of focal therapy on men with primary organ-confined cancer.

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