Cancer prognosis and treatment
Understanding the details of a cancer prognosis
At any point in a patient's diagnosis and treatment, when the doctor is giving you this type of grading or staging information, don't hesitate to ask her to clarify what she's telling you. If the doctor says that a cancer is stage III, for example, it's perfectly okay to ask exactly what that means for the particular type of cancer you're dealing with.
You might also ask how the doctor arrived at her conclusions (which tests were run and what the results showed), how this particular type of tumor tends to develop from one stage or grade to another, and what the cure rate is for this particular cancer at each stage.
Another way to zero in on what the cancer prognosis information means is to ask the doctor if there are cancer cells in just one location -- such as a single tumor -- or if cancer cells have been detected elsewhere, and if so, where.
Understanding the relationship between cancer prognosis and treatment
- The type of cancer, as well as certain other factors (such as whether breast cancer tests positive for the HER2 protein, which tends to lead to more aggressive growth), can also be important in understanding the prognosis and treatment.
- Certain cancers, even rare ones, may have a specific type of treatment available that offers a more optimistic prognosis. It was big news a few years back, for example, when the tumor-suppressing drug Gleevac was found to work very well against certain rare gastrointestinal tumors and the even rarer chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) by blocking specific enzymes that fuel cancer growth.
- The other thing to keep in mind is that cancer prognosis information and treatment options are inextricably intertwined. It might seem like extremely bad news when the doctor tells you that a patient's breast cancer is HER2-positive, which studies have shown carries a worse prognosis than HER2-negative cancers. On the other hand, newly available drugs such as trastuzumab and lapatinib can be very successful against HER2-positive cancers and have no effect on HER2-negative cancers -- so finding out that the cancer is HER2-positive opens the door to additional treatment options.
