Is Hibernation A Promising Terminal Cancer Cure? Doctors Are Hoping Since Testing Laboratory Animals Showed Success, Experiments Results Here

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Chemotherapy and radiotherapy are moderately utilized since their high doses required to treat cancer could cause patients' death. Hibernation may keep away dangerous effects of radiotherapy and stop cancer tumors from growing.

Surgery to remove developments of metastasized cancer tumors is impossible. According to Mirror, Doctors are foreseeing that patients with terminal cancer could be treated from a deep sleep. This is because experiments on laboratory animals showed success.

Italian scientists suggest that placing rats into hibernation keep them from the effects of radiation. As a result, they believe the approach will also succeed on humans within 10 years. Over 150,000 cancer death in the UK every year majority results from the disease being widely spread in the body.

“Around 50 percent of cancer patients have advanced cancer. They have multiple metastases in the body. You cannot use surgery to remove cancer or do radiation in all the affected parts, or you will kill the patients trying to destroy cancer," Professor Marco Durante, of the National Institute of Nuclear Physics in Italy, said.

However, if patients are placed into artificial apathy (hibernation) cancer tumors' growth will be stopped.
Radio-resistance will also be increased to cure all the different metastases without killing the patient, he added.

As to the process of hibernation, the body temperature will be dropped from the normal 37⁰C to around 14⁰C. Patients then are placed in a cooled deep-sleep called synthetic torpor for almost seven days, The Sun reported.

Scientists believe that this sleeping stage also enhances the body’s competency to restore DNA injury. “You wake up the patients, and they are cured. That is our ambition.” Professor Durante told the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting in Boston.

The experiments display hibernation decreases the toxicity of radiation by approximately 40 percent. According to Cancer Research UK, the effects of hibernation are difficult to predict. Some cautious trials in laboratory models should be done before the method is considered safe or effective.