Cancer

[alexb123]

Remission what does it mean?

My understanding is that remission means that the Cancer is gone but they don't tell you that you are cured, in case there are still a few undetected Cancer cells.

However if you have been in remission for 5 year or so could you then say you are cured?

Really my question is how long do you have to be in remission before you are classified as cured?

 

[Light]

Remission what does it mean?

My understanding is that remission means that the Cancer is gone but they don't tell you that you are cured, in case there are still a few undetected Cancer cells.

However if you have been in remission for 5 year or so could you then say you are cured?

Really my question is how long do you have to be in remission before you are classified as cured?

Medically speaking, you cannot ever say you are cured. Not even after 20 years. The reason is that cancerous cells can remain dormant and reactivate at any time. It's been known to happen after 10, 15, 30 years - with no indication of anything in the interim period.

 

[gukarma]

Which doesn't mean much. No human is ever cured from cancer. If you let a human live for as long as possible, in the healthiest of environments in the healthiest manner possible, he'd die of cancer.

Our telomerase is funny like that.

So if you are in remission and you live long enough, you will eventually get cancer again, even if this cancer is not at all related to your first one.

 

[alexb123]

So if you have a brain tumour that has been in remission for 5 years do you still have a brain tumour?

 

[Hercules Rockefeller]

No human is ever cured from cancer.

Well, I guess it depends on your definition of “cured”. As indicated above, you can never be 100% sure that all cancerous cells have been removed during a treatment. But many solid tumors that are detected early can be removed with surgery without the cancer ever reappearing. That seems like a pretty reasonable definition of “cured” to me.

If you let a human live for as long as possible, in the healthiest of environments in the healthiest manner possible, he'd die of cancer.

No, not necessarily. That’s not a given fact at all. Plenty of people die at a ripe old age without contracting cancer.

Our telomerase is funny like that.

There’s a lot more to <I>in vivo</I> development of cancer than telomerase reactivation.

As to the original question, as is typical for internet science forums, everyone is talking about “cancer” as a single disease whereas, in fact, there are many different types of cancers. Whilst there are some genetic/molecular similarities between all cancers, at the cellular level each different type is, in many ways, a completely different disease with different pathologies, different prognoses and different likelihoods of remission and relapse.

As far as I know, a broadly speaking, solid tumors removed with surgery have a much higher likelihood of being cured (and lower likelihood of relapse) than do ‘soft’ tissue cancers like leukemia, or cancers that metastasize quickly like colon cancer or melanoma.
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[Kumar]

Whether cancer cells spread faster, if treated but not killed/removed completely by treatments?