Local Orange County Doctor Uses Hyperbaric Oxygen to Fight Brain Cancer
Columnist Jane Glenn Hass of the Orange County Register recently interviewed renowned neurosurgeon specialist Dr. Christopher Duma. Dr. Duma is the medical director of brain and spine surgeons in the brain tumor program at Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian in Newport Beach.
“Glioblastoma, is an aggressive brain cancer,” says Dr. Christopher Duma. "Once diagnosed, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts was dead in 13 months despite treatment at Harvard and Duke Universities," says Duma, who also serves as assistant clinical professor of neurosurgery at the University of California, Irvine. Despite this grim reality of what glioblastoma is capable of, Dr. Duma believes there is a way to successfully delay or even halt the growth of glioblastoma after diagnosis with the use of hyperbaric oxygen.
Dr. Duma explains in detail why glioblastoma is such an aggressive cancer and why administering hyperbaric oxygen will delay or halt the growth of the tumor.
“Glioblastoma cells are different from other tumors in that it doesn't grow like a snowball and get larger and larger. Instead, it gains access to the brain by infiltration. It moves like an amoeba through the white-matter pathway to the brain – so if we don't stop it, it will gain access to the entire brain and kill the patient.
All current therapies treat the epicenter, or starting place of the tumor, usually with chemotherapies that don't work well in the brain. At the best, this treatment adds two to three months of median survival.
My theory is that we have to catch the tumor as it is moving and cut it off at the pass, so to speak. We have to kind of set up a barrier to stop the tumor from migrating.
Most recently we have understood the reason the cells move -- and move quickly -- is because they are getting away from areas low in oxygen. So it also became my thought to expose patients to high oxygen settings and that will slow down the movement even more and make my boost treatment more effective.
Brains are injured from the tumor, so these areas heal better with extra oxygen and high levels of oxygen actually are synergistic with radiation treatments. Everything works more effectively.”
The Hyperbaric chamber has proven to be very effective. Dr. Duma reported, “So far the treatment has proved effective for a number of patients. Ours survive to 23 months or more – even nine years ---- while the average is 17 months. We have had one patient who has gone a year without tumor recurrence.”
According to Dr. Duma, “Brain cancer is no longer a death sentence.”
For the full article visit the Orange County Times.
For more information of Dr. Christopher Duma visit his web site.
http://www.cduma.com/
