IU School of Medicine Receives Grant for Additional Research into Safety of Shockwave Lithotripsy

INDIANAPOLIS -- Indiana University School of Medicine researchers have received a $4.15 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health to continue their research into the long-term effects of shock wave lithotripsy in the treatment of kidney stones.

The IU team of researchers has shown in previous studies that some damage of kidney tissue and impairment of kidney function is directly related to the number and intensity of shock waves administered to break up kidney stones during lithotripsy.

The NIH grant is a renewal of a project grant first awarded in1994. Andrew P. Evan, Ph.D., professor of anatomy, is principal investigator of the study.

With the new funding, Dr. Evan and his colleagues will study the biological effects on tissue of shock waves on kidney tissue. They also will explore the physics of the shock waves to better understand how shock waves cause the damage.

“The main goal of the project is to understand how shock waves injure tissue and how they break up stones,” Dr. Evan said. “Once we understand the mechanisms of those two events, we can explore the possibilities for separating the effects so we can minimize the tissue injury while still efficiently breaking the stones.”

The researchers will create detection systems to monitor the effect of the shock waves as they travel through body fluid. The different pressures generated by the shock waves traveling through the body fluid create bubbles, which expand and collapse as the shock waves pass through the fluid. The collapse of those bubbles will be one focus of the research, giving the scientists clues to the causes of the tissue injury and destruction of the kidney stones.

High-tech listening devices will be developed to record the sound of the collapse of the bubbles and high-speed photography will record the image of the bubbles themselves. A separate device will be developed to record the light released when the bubbles collapse, creating which is referred to as sonoluminescence.

By compiling this data, the researchers hope to generate objectively determined criteria for the safe clinical use of shock wave lithotripsy.

In addition to researchers from IU, scientists from the California Institute of Technology, Boston University, University of Washington-Seattle, and Methodist Hospital of Clarian Health will participate in the study.

Contact: Mary Hardin
317-274-7722
mhardin@iupui.edu

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