A light for healing

GentleWaves began its life as a beauty treatment, but it may eventually end up being used to help heal the skin of cancer patients.

Dr. Kelley Hails sees the simple procedure as a potentially powerful weapon against inflammation and skin burns caused by radiation treatments, particularly in breast and mouth-and-neck cancer patients.

"We're looking at a treatment that carries absolutely zero risk. You could use it in emergency clinics, burn clinics and radiation oncology wards to help treat skin inflammation and make things easier and less painful for the patient," said Hails, the founder and medical director of Seacoast Rejuvenation Center and a former chief of emergency services at Wentworth-Douglass Hospital.

GentleWaves is a non-invasive treatment that uses yellow light-emitting diode (LED) light and was originally designed and FDA approved to combat wrinkles and skin conditions such as rosacea or sunburn. New research from Louisiana radiation oncologist Dr. M. Maitland DeLand suggests that the device could also have medical applications.

The treatment uses intermittent flashes of light on a patient's skin for a minute or so, which Hails said aids the production of collagen, the skin's elastic component. She said it also reduces inflammatory enzymes in the skin.

That could be the key component from a medical point of view.

Dr. James Becht, a radiation oncologist at Wentworth-Douglass, cautioned that medical professionals do not yet have the practical data necessary to figure out how well GentleWaves worked. He said if it is proven to lessen inflammation, it could be a huge boon for the course of radiation treatment.

"It's certainly very compelling. If we found that this kind of treatment could improve radiation tolerance and take care of some of the cosmetic effects as well, I think that would be the heart of the matter," Becht said.

Becht said in head-and-neck and breast cancers, the cancerous cells are concentrated close to the skin's surface, which forces the radiation treatment to affect the top layers of the skin and can cause inflammation and pain in the area. He noted that radiation treatments have a schedule, and that if GentleWaves could ease side effects, that schedule would be easier to keep.

It's the potential for breast cancer research in particular that has drawn attention to GentleWaves. While the side effects from radiation themselves are not life threatening, its treatment makes the process much less painful, according to Kelley Hails.

Dr. Jonathan Eneman, an oncologist at York Hospital, said the machine has the potential to help patients, but that the DeLand study was not wide enough in scope to make a conclusive judgment. He cautioned that the study did not appear to use a placebo, had a small sample size, and seemed to feature what he characterized as an unusually high number of patients who had to interrupt their treatment.

"If it's something real that could help minimize the risks, that would obviously be great. But it's still an application that has not been extensively tested yet," Eneman said.

The DeLand study appeared in the February 27 edition of Lasers in Medicine and Surgery, a medical research journal that detailed the potential for inflammatory treatment. Hails said she expects more research in the near future and said if the technology becomes popular, she would expect to initially see patients from oncology clinics sent her way.

But "I suspect in the long run, hospitals will have the technology right there. They are expensive machines, like any piece of medical equipment, but they really have such a fascinating application," Hails said.

Currently, the machine is still used to treat skin conditions and wrinkles. Patients who come to her to shine the therapeutic light on themselves have given her overwhelmingly positive feedback, she said.

Although she said there are no risks, Hails did say that maintenance appointments have to be continued over past the initial treatments or its effects will begin to fade. It is unclear if that would be the same with radiation treatments.

Source: www.seacoastonline.com