While brain cancer treatments are particularly heavy to bear, a simple helmet worn for a few hours a day at home has made it possible, in a much less invasive way, to reduce the size of a tumor by 31%.
- Life expectancy following diagnosis of glioblastoma is a maximum of two years.
- The five-year survival rate for this brain cancer is only 4%.
It is a small revolution in the field of oncology. Magnetic helmet reduced brain tumor by more than a third, as evidenced an essay published in Frontiers in Oncology.
A new magnetic helmet
Brain cancers are traditionally treated with a combination of surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy and drugs. Faced with the failure of all these medications on a patient, researchers at the Neurological Institute of Houston decided to test a new magnetic helmet on him.
The patient, aged 53, suffered from glioblastoma. In April 2020 he started treatment, which was well tolerated, and after just 36 days the tumor had shrunk by 31%.
“The first non-invasive therapy for glioblastoma”
“Thanks to the courage of this patient and his family, we were able to test and verify the potential effectiveness of the world’s first non-invasive therapy for glioblastoma,” said David S. Baskin, one of the pilots in the experiment. “This helmet opens up a whole new world”, he concludes.
The medical device also has the significant advantage of being able to be used at home, and thus of avoiding long and painful hospitalizations.
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