Article and Video CATEGORIES
Dr. Jack West is a medical oncologist and thoracic oncology specialist, and Executive Director of Employer Services at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Center in Duarte, CA.
Malignant pleural mesothelioma (MPM) is a challenging cancer to treat for many reasons, one of which being the difficulty in assessing whether there has been any meaningful change in the volume of a cancer that doesn't tend to appear as a discrete mass, but most commonly as thickening of the pleura, the lining around the lung that is normally a thin, onion skin, but can thicken to be more like an orange rind or even thicker. We can often see this pattern in some people with lung cancer who happen to have a form of the disease that also primarily appears as pleural-based deposits of cancer.
Here's a post I did for another site about this issue of imaging to assess response in MPM. I hope it's helpful to those of you with pleural-based disease.
Please feel free to offer comments and raise questions in our
discussion forums.
Related Content
Forum Discussions
n3p, Hi and welcome to Grace. I'm sorry you have to check for new nodules. It does sound like your onc has good reason not to be alarmed that you have...
Thanks for the thoughtful response, I really appreciate that! All your points make sense. I will check back in later.
Please do check back in. It looks like I forgot to paste in links for that article. I'm going back to edit in the links.
Hi blp2020,
Welcome to Grace. I'm sorry you're having trouble. It would be very extremely rare to find a pancoast tumor in person your age. They are normally found in older...
Hi Sel87, Welcome to Grace. I'm so terribly sorry that your mother is going through this. I'm going to assume that there are no brain mets found, so let me know...
Hi Sean,
Welcome to Grace. I'm so sorry you're going through this. I can only imagine your worry about metastases and I hope that's not the case.
Liver hemangiomas are thought...