Chilling Out Leg Pain

Reported June 2005

MOUNTIAN VIEW, Calif. (Ivanhoe Broadcast News) -- A hot topic in science and technology is cold medicine. That may sound like a contradiction, but cold temperatures help kill tumors, settle down rapid heartbeats, and now the high-tech cold snap attacks deadly leg pain.

At this California hospital, doctors treat chronic leg pain with the chills. It's called CryoPlasty. It works something like balloon angioplasty around the heart.

"It eliminates the pain because there's now adequate blood supply, oxygen, nutrition to the muscular tissues of the leg," James Joye, D.O., an interventional cardiologist at El Camino Hospital in Mountain View, Calif., tells Ivanhoe.

Cardiologists like Joye use cold nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, to inflate a balloon -- opening clogged arteries below the knee. The chilly gas doesn't hurt the artery, but it prevents scar tissue from forming. He says, "We are stunning the cells that normally would create the scar tissue and making them basically down-regulate, disappear."

CryoPlasty helped Karen Hudson, one of 10-million Americans with peripheral vascular disease, or PVD. She says, "I could walk, maybe, a short -- maybe a block or two before it became so uncomfortable I had to sit down."

Many PVD cases lead to surgery or amputation. Cry therapy may help save limbs and lives since PVD is a red flag for heart disease.

Joye says, "They don't die typically because their legs hurt. They die from heart attacks, and they die from strokes and at a much higher frequency than regular patients."

Hudson says she never got cold feet. "I'm really amazed at -- with going in one day and having it done, and then, you know, you go home ... you can walk." ...And without pain.

The FDA approved CryoPlasty three years ago for surgery above the knee. This study is to see how well it works below the knee. There is hope that eventually it can be used to treat clogged arteries around the heart, too.

Click here to Go Inside This Science or contact:

Free information packet on PAD and CryoPlasty
(877) 456-LEGS
http://www.CryoPlasty.com

General information about PAD:
Society of Interventional Radiology on PAD
http://www.sirweb.org/patPub/pvdPad.shtml

American Heart Association on PAD
http://www.americanheart.org/presenter.jhtml?identifier=4692

American Association of Physicists in Medicine
One Physics Ellipse
College Park, MD 20740
301-209-3350
http://www.aapm.org
aapm@aapm.org



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