A Heated Chemotherapy Treatment Increases Five-Year Survival
- Hyperthermic intraperitoneal chemotherapy, or HIPEC, is a heated chemotherapy treatment given at the time of surgery. Unlike intravenous chemotherapy, HIPEC is delivered directly into the abdomen
- When the chemotherapy is heated, it works better than when it’s at room temperature or body temperature
- The process takes about 90 additional minutes of time in the operating room while you're still asleep. No additional recovery time is involved
"Ovarian cancer and the related fallopian tube cancer and primary peritoneal cancer are clinically sort of the same thing," Dr. Lilja says. "They're when cells turn malignant or cancerous and grow in the cavities inside the abdomen, as a layer or coating on the organs like your intestines and your bladder. And in order to treat it appropriately, oftentimes it’s necessary to physically clean it out by a surgical technique where you peel the abnormal tissue out, and leave the stuff that’s normal behind."
Read MoreDuring debulking surgery, cancer cells may break off and remain behind. The HIPEC treatment can seek these cells out and deliver chemotherapy exactly where it is needed, without exposing other parts of the body.
HIPEC Can Be Administered at Any Point During Ovarian Cancer Treatment
According to Dr. Lilja, HIPEC can be administered in all phases of ovarian cancer treatment, often called “treatment settings”:
- In the up-front setting, meaning as part of an initial treatment that could include neoadjuvant chemotherapy combined with surgery or just surgery directly.
- "You could start with HIPEC, depending on the program that’s administering it. It could be [used] after a short course of chemotherapy that we sometimes [administer] to certain [patients] to reduce the cancer tumor burden, as we call it, before we operate, which makes the operation a little less traumatic.
- "Or it can be applied in cases where the cancer has recurred, and where [other types of] chemotherapy are failing."
HIPEC Extends Survival Time
“The evidence is mounting for ovarian cancer,” says Dr. Lilja. “Forty percent of our patients have not recurred within five years, and this seems to be regardless of the number of recurrences they’ve had prior to us entering them into the study. That’s pretty good! That’s a lot higher than for standard chemotherapy alone.”
Because the treatment is given at the time of surgery, there's typically no additional recovery involved. More good news: The treatment seems to be well-tolerated by most all women, with no additional side effects beyond typical surgical risks.
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