drgoogle
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My question is probably quite silly given the tough questions asked by others. But this question has been bothering me for some time and I need to get it addressed. If a lung cancer patient, stage IV with met to a rib has a scan after radiation/chemo and the rib met is no longer in evidence, is the patient still described as being at stage IV?
Forums
Reply # - November 10, 2014, 09:13 PM
Hi drgoogle,
Hi drgoogle,
It's not a silly question at all. Since it's assumed that the cancer cells traveled through the bloodstream to reach the rib and create a metastasis, it's expected that there are still micrometastases in the blood, and the staging remains at stage IV. As Dr. Weiss has said:
"For semantic and statistical purposes, a patient does always stay at their diagnosis stage, unless there was some error in it." - http://cancergrace.org/forums/index.php/topic,10701.msg86553.html#msg86…
JimC
Forum moderator
Reply # - November 11, 2014, 07:44 PM
Yes. Unfortunately, if a
Yes. Unfortunately, if a cancer is stage IV, even if all of the cancer doesn't have any more evidence of visible disease, there is almost always evidence of invisible residual disease. For this reason, patients aren't considered "downstaged" based on changes in the how scans change over time.
-Dr. West