Hi,
June 2014: father (62/former smoker) Dx NSLC squamous poorly differenciated.
July 2014: left pneumonectomy: Staged T2bN0M0.
Sep 2014: adjuvant chemo only one session due to high toxicity.
Nov 2014: post-surgery PET scan: one hot focal lesion in paraspinal muscle near the pneumonectomy incision. Biopsy confirms muscle met. Painful at the moment.
Dec 2014: one more focal muscle lesion in the back. No biopsy done. No pain.
The second muscle lesion has been considered to be a second met. For this reason he has started chemo (carbo+vinorebline). After 4 cycles a CT will be done in order to evaluate response.
As he has only two mets, he is strong and otherwise healthy (no weight lost), would it be possible to think of a more aggressive strategy including surgery? I have read that radical treatment can be useful when the primary is controlled and there are only few mets.
Thank you very much in advance.
Jane
Reply # - January 20, 2015, 04:58 AM
Hi Jane, I'm very sorry your
Hi Jane, I'm very sorry your father has cancer.
Dr. West describes his thoughts here, "To reiterate, I do believe that local therapy for an area of isolated metastatic spread or progression in the face of otherwise very good control makes sense, even though there isn’t a clearly proven value to treating metastatic disease with local therapy. But that approach is predicated on the word “isolated” and the concept of oligometastatic disease. There’s a real problem in following a slippery slope of treating multiple areas of metastatic disease with local therapy just because we can and it’s profitable. Even a small risk of complications is unacceptable when there is no foreseeable benefit to treating multiple areas of truly metastatic disease. In the coming years, we will need to come to terms with the fact that this approach isn’t actually helping patients, and we’ll need to apply the term oligometastatic more appropriately if we have any hope of showing that this approach of local therapy actually helps selected patients. We’ll have to actually apply this approach selectively." http://cancergrace.org/lung/2014/02/23/defining-olig/
Here is a video cast on the subject of radiating oligometastatic nsclc, http://cancergrace.org/radiation/2012/11/24/sbrt-for-oligometastatic-lc/
I hope this helps,
Janine
Reply # - January 20, 2015, 06:18 AM
Thank you very much Janine.
Thank you very much Janine.