healing mucositis with light

elief for Young Cancer Patients
Much of the research into the use of LEDs in medicine has spun off from projects funded by the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For example, when LEDs worked well in providing light to grow plants on the Space Station, researchers found that the diodes also showed promise in many medical applications.

NASA then funded Medical College research and clinical trials using LEDs to treat cancer patients following bone marrow transplants. Mucositis, a very painful side effect of cancer treatment, produces throat and mouth ulcerations and gastrointestinal problems so severe that health suffers as chewing and swallowing food and drink become difficult or even impossible. In the first trial at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, LED treatment proved so successful in treating mucositis in the young patients that another round of trials has been funded.

"We have now at Children's Hospital essentially prevented mucositis since we've been treating these patients once a day for eighty seconds with our handheld light emitting diode arrays," said Dr. Whelan. "Now we have the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in collaboration with us performing a multi-center trial throughout the United States and several foreign countries. If we can replicate the results in other centers and reproduce that same data, which we have published, that will become the standard of care. I contacted the FDA when we had achieved these results, because it was pretty dramatic and we were actually surprised by how well it worked. We're already well into the multi-center trial and we anticipate being done in five years.

"If a patient has cancer and you treat with the (current) standards, which are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, in some case you can cure the patient with standard treatment, which is great. Then there will be those who have recurrences and you escalate into more and more aggressive experimental therapies to try to save their life. Eventually, if you can kill the cancer no other way, you give a lethal dose of chemotherapy and radiation to kill the tumor.

"But then, so you don't kill the patient, you rescue them by giving them a bone marrow transplant that replaces the red blood cells and the white blood cells so you don't have clotting problems and bleed to death or die from overwhelming infection or severe anemia. It does not rescue the mucous membranes, the kidney, the liver, or all kinds of other areas where high-dose chemotherapy and radiation can lead to side effects. The mucous membranes in particular become sore, hemorrhagic, and extremely painful. This prevents the patients from eating or drinking anything so they become dependent on intravenous feeding and wracked with pain in bone marrow transplant isola
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elief for Young Cancer Patients
Much of the research into the use of LEDs in medicine has spun off from projects funded by the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). For example, when LEDs worked well in providing light to grow plants on the Space Station, researchers found that the diodes also showed promise in many medical applications.

NASA then funded Medical College research and clinical trials using LEDs to treat cancer patients following bone marrow transplants. Mucositis, a very painful side effect of cancer treatment, produces throat and mouth ulcerations and gastrointestinal problems so severe that health suffers as chewing and swallowing food and drink become difficult or even impossible. In the first trial at Children's Hospital of Wisconsin, LED treatment proved so successful in treating mucositis in the young patients that another round of trials has been funded.

"We have now at Children's Hospital essentially prevented mucositis since we've been treating these patients once a day for eighty seconds with our handheld light emitting diode arrays," said Dr. Whelan. "Now we have the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) in collaboration with us performing a multi-center trial throughout the United States and several foreign countries. If we can replicate the results in other centers and reproduce that same data, which we have published, that will become the standard of care. I contacted the FDA when we had achieved these results, because it was pretty dramatic and we were actually surprised by how well it worked. We're already well into the multi-center trial and we anticipate being done in five years.

"If a patient has cancer and you treat with the (current) standards, which are surgery, radiation and chemotherapy, in some case you can cure the patient with standard treatment, which is great. Then there will be those who have recurrences and you escalate into more and more aggressive experimental therapies to try to save their life. Eventually, if you can kill the cancer no other way, you give a lethal dose of chemotherapy and radiation to kill the tumor.

"But then, so you don't kill the patient, you rescue them by giving them a bone marrow transplant that replaces the red blood cells and the white blood cells so you don't have clotting problems and bleed to death or die from overwhelming infection or severe anemia. It does not rescue the mucous membranes, the kidney, the liver, or all kinds of other areas where high-dose chemotherapy and radiation can lead to side effects. The mucous membranes in particular become sore, hemorrhagic, and extremely painful. This prevents the patients from eating or drinking anything so they become dependent on intravenous feeding and wracked with pain in bone marrow transplant isola

http://healthlink.mcw.edu/article/1031002355.html