[Clinical study on angiotensin-induced hypertension chemotherapy (IHC)]

It has been found in experiments using rats that there is a lack of autoregulation of blood flow in tumor vessels and a selective increase of blood flow under angiotensin II-induced hypertension when the arterial blood pressure dose not exceed 150 mmHg, while there is no increase in normal tissues (Suzuki et al., JNCI:1981). On the basis of the functional difference of microcirculation, IHC has been developed clinically since 1978. In the procedure of treatment, the mean blood pressure of the patients was maintained at 140-150 mmHg when anti-cancer drugs were administered along with the continuous intravenous infusion of angiotensin II. In a randomized controlled study on gastric carcinoma treated with an AFM regimen, the response rate was 42.5% (8/21) in IHC vs. 10.5% (2/19) in non-IHC (p less than 0.05). The "initial response time" (15.5 vs. 28.8 days) and the "effective tumor reduction time" (36.7 vs. 57.5 days) were significantly shorter (p less than 0.01) in the IHC group. Frequency and grade of side effects were not different statistically. In an open trial, the overall response rate was 39.6% (54/134) and each response was closely related to the difference of drug sensitivity of tumor types. For example, it was 90.0% (9/10) in cancers of the head & neck, 66.7% (4/6) in the breast, 42.8% (12/28) in the stomach, 46.2% (6/13) in the pancreas, 23.1% (3/13) in the colon and 23.8% (5/21) in the lung. The effect on metastatic lymphnodes was 79.4% (27/34), which was higher than that of primary (48.1% : 26/54) and other organ metastases (34.6% : 18/52). Finally, this paper dealt with the problem of clinical evaluation of tumor lesions with a lot of fibrous granulation tissue and coagulative necrosis, and of the investigation of differential imaging.