[Thermotherapy of tumors]

In this paper a review as well as some of our results concerning the use of hyperthermia in the treatment of tumors are presented. Basically there are two broad categories of hyperthermia: systemic and localized. Local hyperthermia used as an adjunct to standard treatments (surgical therapy, radiation therapy, chemotherapy) as well as immunotherapy has gained more application in the experimental studies of thermotherapy in the clinic. Heat kills cells in a predictable and repeatable way, however, many of basic mechanisms relating to cell killing are still poorly understood. Despite that the intrinsic thermal sensitivity of tumor cells are identical to that of normal cells the difference in thermal sensitivity arises between tumor and normal tissue due to environmental and pathophysiological differences. The application of hyperthermia in multimodal tumor therapy has a strong biological rationale because using hyperthermia as an adjuvant to other therapies complementary and synergistic cytotoxic effects can be achieved leading to a significant improvement of the efficacy of tumor therapy. So did the combined treatment of local hyperthermia and immunotherapy show a synergistic effect due to enhancement of NK activity. However, the administration of some chemotherapeutics can abolish the observed synergism indicating that the use of a combined therapy in clinics should be attempted cautiously.