Gassing or freezing?
Globally, cervical cancer continues to top the disease burden of countries with low- to middle-income levels. According to Miriam Cremer and eight other colleagues at Basic Health International (BHI) in New York, the persistent public health challenge remained so evidently due to the gap between screening outcomes and the availability of effective but affordable treatment, particularly in remote areas around the world.
The team published their report in this year’s issue of the Global Health: Science and Practice.
Today, the most innovative, relatively inexpensive therapeutic approach against cervical cancer with impressive outcomes is “cryotherapy” (literally, “treatment by extreme cold”), which is also being referred to as “cryosurgery” (literally, “operation by extreme cold”). It works by exposing a tumor in freezing temperature of up to -105 degrees Celsius, killing the cancerous cells within before removing the tumor.
Unfortunately, this treatment method is not yet available in the Philippines, although past news reports referred to a Chinese hospital in Guangzhou that specialized in this approach. Nevertheless, it is to our advantage to know about this technology.
The standard form of cryotherapy is gas-based, which uses either compressed carbon dioxide or nitrous oxide gas. However, there are three challenges to this form.
First, procuring the gas can be difficult, especially in our country where the generation technology is either underdeveloped or inexistent. Second, gas tanks may be accessible only in urban areas and not in remote locations. Third, high volume demand requires a large storage area because a standard size tank can serve only three patients. A non-gas option, which uses electricity, is still under development in the United States.
In the Cremer study, its advantages are clear over nitrous oxide-based machines. It has slightly deeper lateral freeze (i.e. in areas surrounding the point of application - 7.93 mm) and wider freeze diameter (30.71 mm). Thus, it can treat larger tumors, which can generate a frozen tumor of 8.27 g. Its freeze depth is, however, smaller at 6.33 mm.
Moreover, it must be noted that unlike surgery, surrounding health tissues, blood vessels and nerves may be frozen as well when it is located within the effective freeze diameter. Here is what Brent Weeks wrote in The Broken Eye (2014): “More choices in a limited time didn’t mean you could do everything—it meant that you could do anything, so you probably did nothing, frozen with indecision.”