Lung Cancer / Mesothelioma
At this year’s ASCO meeting, I had the opportunity to review and provide commentary on several presentations from other researchers, all on the topic of how to refine our ability to predict how patients will do after surgery for stage I - IIIA NSCLC, with an idea that this information can help guide decisions […]
2 CommentsI’ve previously described the concept of the “precocious metastasis”, the situation in which a patient presents with early stage NSCLC, except for a single metastasis, most typically in the brain or adrenal gland (see prior post). Our conventional teaching is that a patient with any metastatic disease almost certainly has additional micrometastatic disease, cancer […]
0 CommentsI was reminded of the important topic of occult N2 NSCLC by a comprehensive review that just came out in the Journal of Thoracic Oncology (abstract here) by a friend, thoracic surgeon Frank Detterbeck, who leads the thoracic oncology program at Yale. To review the basics of lymph nodes for lung cancer, N0 means no lymph […]
0 CommentsPeople who have been following my comments know that I am often questioning the wisdom of surgery in patients who don’t fit the usual criteria for resection, which is most commonly pursued in stage I and II NSCLC and is often considered an option for some patients with stage IIIA NSCLC. To provide a […]
6 Comments Dr. Laskin has appreciated the warm welcome. Not only have you not scared her off, she’s written her first post for us.
By the way, it’s misleading to have my name and picture and “about the author” next to these posts by our new faculty — the software upgrade will fix this. Here’s her […]
There’s a website called Adjuvant! Online, developed by oncologist Peter Ravdin, that is best known for its use after surgery for breast cancer in assessing the value of post-operative chemo. Because I don’t really treat breast cancer, I haven’t spent time on the website, but I do know that it’s a valued resource among practicing oncologists who […]
0 CommentsWhile there is a lot of variability in the clinical behavior of bronchioloalveolar carcinoma (BAC), there are some commonly observed findings that are now leading lung cancer experts to consider it as a distinct clinical entity worthy of special consideration for management. Among the important areas for potentially special clinical management is in surgical management of […]
0 CommentsAlthough I’ve described this concept in a few posts over the past year, it’s time for me to dedicate some real discussion to the concept of individualizing treatment with the ERCC1 marker. ERCC1 stands for excision repair cross-complementing group 1, and it helps repair damage to DNA. Now, validated, reliable testing for ERCC1 in […]
6 CommentsThe standard of care for at least stage I and II NSCLC is surgery, sometimes followed by chemotherapy. We know, however, that not every patient who presents with early stage NSCLC is healthy enough to pursue surgery, whether due to general age-related or other illnesses, or due specifically to a low pulmonary reserves, usually […]
0 CommentsIn a very recent post I provided an introduction to the special case in NSCLC known as a Pancoast tumor, including a historical perspective of how it has evolved from being perceived initially as an untreatable, uniformly fatal diagnosis to a cancer that could be cured with radiation and then surgery in a significant minority of […]
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