3 ms·
"Chemotherapy, for most cancers, achieves tumor shrinkage and a temporary extension of life, at the cost of severe life quality degradataion." This is just not
by Gatsky 11y ago
"Chemotherapy, for most cancers, achieves tumor shrinkage and a temporary extension of life, at the cost of severe life quality degradataion."
This is just not true.
I provide you with this list of cases where chemotherapy can cure people (established in phase III double blind randomised controlled trials):
Early stage breast cancer
Early stage colon cancer
Acute myeloid leukaemia
Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia
Diffuse large B-cell Lymphoma
Paediatric neuroblastoma, retinoblastoma, nephroblastoma
etc etc
Testicular seminoma and non-seminoma
Testicular germ cell tumours
Note that breast and colon cancer are among the top 3 most common cancers.
- iskander 11y agoLet me revise that: for solid tumors, chemotherapy can cure people, but typically doesn't. At one extreme, early stage (solid) cancers are primarily cured by surgery. At the other extreme (metastasis), chemotherapy is a terminal rollercoaster. In between those extremes (e.g. some limited local progression), adjuvant chemotherapy seems to be useful for breast cancer, but has only a very small effect for colon cancer (http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673607618662 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673607...) and none for lung cancer (http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/95/19/1453.short http://jnci.oxfordjournals.org/content/95/19/1453.short).
- Gatsky 11y agoWhen you say adjuvant chemotherapy 'seems' to be useful in breast cancer, what exactly do you mean? How does a meta-analysis of 20,000 patients in randomized controlled trials showing a persistent reduction in risk of recurrence and death equate to 'seeming'? http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25917869 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25917869