Laser therapy has the potential to treat a range of skin cancers, but it is far from certain that it will be effective in treating skin cancers.
In this case, a team of researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, have been able to prove that laser therapy can be effective for treating melanoma, the most common type of skin cancer.
They recently published their results in the journal PLOS ONE.
“The goal of this study was to find a novel, well-tolerated, and efficient laser therapy that could be used to treat melanoma,” said senior author Thomas P. Coyle, a professor of surgery and dermatology at UC San Francisco.
“Our results show that, by treating melanomas with lasers, we can achieve a clinically meaningful outcome with minimal side effects.”
In this study, the team treated four patients with melanoma who had failed to respond to standard therapies, including surgery.
Each patient received a laser treatment, which was applied in a single application.
The team found that the laser therapy was effective for more than 90 percent of the patients.
The patients received no adverse events.
“We believe our results are very promising, especially considering that most patients with nonmelanoma skin cancers will respond to this treatment and will not experience any adverse events,” said co-author James E. Pascarella, professor of dermatology and pediatrics at UCSF.
“This could potentially be an important breakthrough for patients with skin cancers in general.”
For the study, Coyle and his colleagues compared the efficacy of the laser treatment and standard therapy.
The researchers showed that using laser therapy to treat nonmelanian melanoma resulted in a reduction in the number of melanoma cells in the skin, an improvement in the quality of the patient’s skin, and a decrease in the overall number of metastatic melanoma.
Additionally, the laser treatments improved the appearance of the skin around the tumor, and it appeared to improve the patient with melanomas that were already on the skin.
“It’s important to understand that these are preliminary results, and we will continue to monitor the results,” said Dr. Pancarella.
“I think we have the potential, though, to see this work in other melanoma types.”
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