Suffocated Cancer

Doctors do not know the cause of cancer, nor can they prevent a tumor from spreading and migrating. Their only hope, in treating the disease, is to catch a malignant tumor early, burn it with X-ray or cut it out. Last week, in the Archives of Surgery, Dr. Frederick Madison Allen of Manhattan's Polyclinic Hospital suggested a new way of killing cancers: suffocation.

Several years ago, Dr. Allen broke down large cancerous tumors in mice, rats and dogs by tying off, for short periods of time, the arteries which fed the tumors with blood and oxygen. For some unknown reason the normal tissues surrounding the tumors were not affected by lack of nourishment.

Dr. Allen next tried choking off a human tumor. For his subject he chose a 76-year-old man with a large funguslike growth on his cheek, just in front of his ear. Working with Dr. Allen, Surgeon Robert Emery Brennan gave the patient a local anesthetic, punctured the skin around the margin of the tumor, passed rubber ligatures through these openings and tied off the arteries that supplied the tumor with blood. After an hour and a half, when the tumor had darkened slightly, the ligatures were untied.

Four days later Dr. Brennan "burrowed deeply" under the tumor, tied off the arteries again, deprived the tumor of nourishment for three and a quarter hours. Shortly afterward the tumor began to slough off. Normal tissues surrounding the growth, which also had their blood supply cut off, were not injured.

After the tumor peeled off, the patient was troubled with a new growth the size of "a large lima bean." When the doctors injected into it an arsenic compound, the lump disappeared in a few days. The patient lived "free from tumor" for two years, finally died of heart failure.

"This entire work," Dr. Allen warned, "is strictly in an experimental stage." Often it is impossible to tie off blood vessels and the treatment can be used only for certain localized external growths. But he reminded his colleagues that tumors can be "asphyxiated" by other means. He urged that research be continued on treatment combining X-ray and artificially induced inflammation.

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