(1989) Riedlinger, Rainer E.; Brümmer, Franz; Hülser, Dieter F.
Extracorporeal lithotripsy has been successfully established, based on different principles of generating and focusing the shock waves. Lithotripters have also been used to investigate the influence of shocks to cancer cells and solid tumors. With two different trans-mitters (spark-gap type XL-1 and piezo-resonance type MW 2) we applied shock waves and short high power US-pulses to suspended and immobilized tumor cells and multicell spheroids. With MW 2 significant local damage on cell spheroids in gelatin was achieved, caused by locally controlled cavitation. The results are compared to each other.
The application of extracorporeal generated shock waves in medicine for the fragmentation of human kidney and gall stones proved to be a very successful technique. Shock wave lithotripsy, however, is not free of tissue damaging side effects. One major mechanism for the fragmentation of stones as well as for the side effects is cavitation, ie. the formation and movement of bubbles in liquids exposed to tensile forces. Collapse of cavitation bubbIes is accompanied by local "hot spots" of several 1,000 K, thus generating free radicals. We investigated the contribution of these free radicals to cellular injury by varying the cellular amount of a well known scavenger of free radicals, α-tocopherol.
