Hyperbaric oxygen therapy and squamous cell carcinoma cell line growth.

Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) promotes tissue healing by increasing oxygenation. Therefore, HBO therapy is clinically useful for some patients who have undergone major cancer resection and/or radiotherapy to the head and neck. For individual patients, however, there might be undetected viable tumor present at the time of therapy. This study was performed to determine if increased tissue oxygen had a measurable effect on the growth of squamous carcinoma xenotransplants which had been derived from head and neck cancers. After the successful growth of two well-established human squamous cell carcinoma cell lines (183 and 1483), each tumor was transplanted into 20 mice. Every mouse received four transplants of 10(6) cells. Ten mice with 40 xenotransplants in each group were treated with HBO daily for 90 minutes at a pressure of 2 atm, whereas the other 10 formed the control group. The mice transplanted with cell line 1483 were treated for 21 days; mice transplanted with cell line 183 were treated for 28 days. The tumor weight, volume, and histology were evaluated. No significant difference was found between experimental groups. This study suggests that increased tissue oxygen neither significantly increases nor decreases the growth of squamous cell carcinoma.