Cancer 101
Not yet a member?
One common thread in the management of most solid tumors (the cancers of organs like lung, breast, colon, kidney, and others, as opposed to cancers of the blood (leukemias) or lymphatic system (lymphomas) is the use of scans to assess whether the cancer is responding, progressing, or remaining stable. Because these imaging studies provide a [...]
9 CommentsOr “What I Say vs. What I Do”
The current recommendations from the American College of Chest Physicians is for patients who underwent treatment with curative intent for lung cancer, and who are still healthy enough to be a candidate for any further aggressive treatment if needed, should undergo repeat doctor visits every [...]
I have a remarkably delightful patient who initially developed a stage I NSCLC in 1998, and this was treated with standard surgery. Three years later, she was found on a routine follow-up scan to have disease in her mediastinum. This was biopsied and was found to look remarkably like her original cancer [...]
0 CommentsI’ve had a series of questions about how frequent follow-up should be for LC after surgery for early stage disease, or potentially after chemo and radiation for stage III disease. The most appropriate answer to to say that there is really essentially no data on this subject, so people have made [...]
2 CommentsOver the past several years, oncologists have experienced an evolution in the way we think about stable disease, at least in the context of lung cancer. Historically, oncologists have graded our work by looking at response rates, or the percentage of patients with tumor shrinkage of 50% or more of their [...]
6 CommentsPET stands for positron emission tomography, and this generally uses a safe radioactive tracer molecule called 18F-fluoro-2-deoxy-D-glucose (FDG). Fortunately, that’s not on the quiz — you don’t need to know it. All that is worth knowing is that PET scans offer “metabolic imaging”, which detects differences in the metabolism of tissues. [...]
10 Comments
GRACE Home
| Forums
| About GRACE
| 
Donate
| GRACE Website Tutorial
| Contact
| Disclaimer
Disclaimer: The information provided at GRACE is for informational purposes only. The faculty of GRACE is not providing medical advice, diagnosis or treatment and cannot replace the medical advice of your doctor or health care provider. (Full Disclaimer)
© 2007-2009 GRACE. All rights reserved.
