The short version
- After one session of high-intensity focused ultrasound, the five most severe symptoms in 54 advanced-cancer patients were at their lowest a month later.
- Back pain the day after treatment was linked to about twice the risk of death during follow-up, which may make it a useful warning sign.
- The study had no pre-treatment baseline and no control group, so it cannot show that the ultrasound itself relieved anything.
At Mianyang Central Hospital in Sichuan, researchers followed 54 people with advanced cancer, 81% of them stage IV, after a single session of high-intensity focused ultrasound (HIFU). HIFU heats a tumor from outside the body with converging sound beams. The most common cancers were liver, pancreatic and lung. Patients rated 14 symptoms on a 0–10 scale and filled in a standard quality-of-life questionnaire on the day after treatment, at one week, and at one, two and three months. The five most severe symptoms, led by sleep disturbance and back pain, reached their lowest scores at one month. Global quality of life dipped at one week (67.6 of 100) and recovered at one month (77.4). The paper appeared on November 2 in Patient Preference and Adherence.
The authors list the limits themselves. The first measurement came after treatment, not before. There was no comparison group. The symptom checklist has not been validated, and patients dropped out as the months went on. So the study shows what three months after HIFU looked like, not what HIFU changed. Median survival was 298 days. Patients with back pain the day after treatment had about 2.25 times the risk of dying during follow-up, an unadjusted, hypothesis-generating link.
It is a palliative-care data point, with a controlled trial still to come.
