Can cancer be cured after surgery? Do you want to continue treatment? all need?
Tumor cure is often used in the "5 years" node. If the patient has no signs of recurrence within 5 years after treatment, it is considered to be clinically cured. This is not a real and complete cure. About 20% of recurrences will occur in 5 years later. Although clinical prognosis evaluation is often made based on the specific situation of the patient, it cannot be completely certain. Therefore, the end of treatment cannot be said to be absolutely cured or cured.
- Not all cancers require retreatment after surgery
How is cancer treated? The main basis is the TNM staging.
Generally, in the absence of lymph node metastasis (N) or distant metastasis (M), the scope of tumor infiltration is not large (T). For stage I tumors, most of them can be treated by surgery, and most of them do not need postoperative surgery. Adjuvant therapy, such as non-small cell lung cancer stage IA, gastric cancer stage I, colorectal cancer stage I, etc.
Is it okay to "intensify" and "consolidate" the effect of treatment for early stage cancer and do several chemotherapy treatments? Chemotherapy has a lot of toxic and side effects. If the benefit is less than the damage, it doesn't make much sense, right? Early-stage cancer is limited to one litter, and the scalpel can almost remove it. The number of residual cancer cells should be small, so systemic medication is not worth it, right? And the human immune system also has a certain effect on cancer cells.
- Consider treatment for some cancers after surgery
There is also a cancer that is a bit later than the early stage, or the patient's physical condition, the benefit of postoperative adjuvant therapy cannot be determined, and the pros and cons need to be weighed and considered carefully.
Postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy for stage IB non-small cell lung cancer is more controversial. Most of the Chinese medical circles do not recommend postoperative chemotherapy, while many foreign doctors suggest that if there are high-risk factors for recurrence after surgery, such as vascular invasion and poor tissue differentiation, " Consider" chemotherapy. How to do it? If the patient is willing and in good physical condition, chemotherapy may be better.
There are also some older patients who have benefit, but it is not very obvious, and generally do not do chemotherapy. For example, in stage II colon cancer patients with high risk of recurrence and low expression of microsatellite instability, platinum is often used in chemotherapy, which is highly neurotoxic, with numbness and tingling in the hands and feet.
- Some cancers have more benefits than harms after surgery
For some relatively late tumors, surgery can only remove local cancer cells, and the number of remaining cancer cells in other parts of the body is relatively large, and they are latent and may come back in time. This requires adjuvant therapy to reduce residual cancer cells to a certain extent. Regardless of physical and economic factors, chemotherapy should be beneficial.
Do you need treatment after cancer surgery? How to treat? It is recommended according to the existing guidelines and consensus, and it is based on the conclusions drawn from many clinical studies. The plan that benefits most people will not be the same for every patient. In the case of uncertainty about the patient's treatment effect, it should be best to refer to these recommendations. Science fights cancer, cares for life! I'm Dr. Liu Yongyi, thank you for reading!