What are shock waves? Extracorporeal shock waves are pressure waves generated outside the body that can be focused at a specific site within the body. Shock waves are characterized by high positive pressures, up to 100 MPa (over 100 times atmospheric pressure), and negative pressures of 5-10 MPa. They have a rapid rise time of 30-120 nanoseconds (10-9) and a short, 5 microsecond (10-6) pulse du...

BACKGROUND Extracorporeal shock wave therapy has been successfully introduced for the treatment of cellulite in recent years. However, it is still unknown whether the individual clinical outcome of cellulite treatment with extracorporeal shock wave therapy can be predicted by the patient's individual cellulite grade at baseline, individual patient age, body mass index (BMI), weight, and/or heig...

Lameness, and more specifically, joint disease, causes significant loss of use of athletic horses and has a large economic impact on the horse industry. Despite numerous medical treatments, novel treatments are needed. Recent experimental evidence and anecdotal clinical impressions of extracorporeal shockwave therapy (ESWT) for the treatment of osteoarthritis (OA) have been reported.13 Unpublis...

Low-energy extracorporeal shock wave therapy (SWT) has been shown to improve myocardial dysfunction, hind limb ischemia, erectile function, and to facilitate cell therapy and healing process. These therapeutic effects were mainly due to promoting angiogenesis. Since chronic kidney diseases are characterized by renal fibrosis and capillaries rarefaction, they may benefit from a proangiogenic tre...

[Purpose] To report the effects of radial extracorporeal shock wave therapy (RSWT) on heterotopic ossification (HO). [Subjects and Methods] Two cases of neurogenic HO in the upper extremity were administered RSWT using the MASTER PLUS(®) MP 2000 (Storz, Tägerwilen, Switzerland) and ultrasonographic guidance. The RSWT protocol consisted of 3,000 pulses at a frequency of 12 Hz during each treatme...

INTRODUCTION Lateral epicondylitis, or "tennis elbow", is a relatively common disorder. Various therapeutic modalities have been tried in an attempt to manage the disorder but neither the conservative methods nor the surgical options have proved to be beneficial so far. During the past decade in the USA and European countries and the past several years in Bulgaria, the shock wave therapy (focus...

We undertook a prospective, randomised study to compare the analgesic effect of injection of steroid and of extracorporeal shock-wave therapy (ESWT) for the treatment of tennis elbow. Group 1 received a single injection of 20 mg of triamcinolone with lignocaine while group 2 received 2000 shock waves in three sessions at weekly intervals. After six weeks there was a significant difference betwe...

Extracorporeal shock waves are high-pressure pulses of microsecond duration clinically used for lithotripsy. Recently, shock waves been shown to cause a transient increase of the permeability of the cell membrane. We therefore hypothesized that shock waves might be able to transfer tumoricidal agents into tumor cells and examined this in vitro and in vivo. In vitro, the ribosome inactivating pr...