Intermittent ice-cooling to prevent skin heat injury caused by high-intensity focused ultrasound therapy targeting desmoid-type fibromatosis: A case report.
Liangyu Fang, Xiaoye Hu, Yinchuan Xu and 2 others
PMID 33575454WHAT IT FOUND
In a patient receiving high-intensity focused ultrasound for desmoid-type fibromatosis, intermittent ice-cooling during treatment pauses was associated with no obvious skin injury in later sessions.
The report does not show the cooling prevented burns.
Key findings
01After the third HIFU session, the patient developed a third-degree skin burn and stopped treatment for three months; from the fourth session, intermittent ice-cooling was used.
02The report says the patient had no obvious skin injury during the three HIFU treatments after ice-cooling began and had a good anti-tumor therapeutic effect.
03Ice-cooling was applied to the reddest skin spot for 10 seconds during treatment pauses, with longer cooling if redness, swelling, blistering, or darkening appeared.
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What it does not show
This is a case report of a single patient, so it cannot establish whether ice-cooling prevents skin burns in other patients. Ice-cooling was started only after a third-degree burn, and the report does not separate its effect from other changes in the HIFU treatment sequence. The authors state that the patient's total HIFU treatment time was extended and that large-scale clinical trials are needed.
Declared interests
The authors declare no competing interests. The study was supported by the Medical and Health Science and Technology Project of Zhejiang Province and the Appropriate Technology Cultivation and Promotion Project of Zhejiang Medical and Health Office.
The easy way to misread this
Do not conclude that intermittent ice-cooling prevents skin burns during HIFU for all patients. This is a single-patient report, and the authors say large-scale clinical trials are needed.