I’m continually seeing certain drugs for treatment of Neuroendocrine Tumours (NETs) described as chemotherapy. I think there must be some confusion with more modern drugs which are more targeted and work in a different way to Chemotherapy.
I researched several sites and they all tend to provide a summary of chemotherapy which is worded like this: Chemotherapy means:
a treatment of cancer by using anti-cancer…
When you’ve been diagnosed with cancer at an incurable stage, certain words start to mean more. Take ‘palliative’ for example. Before I was diagnosed I had always associated the word ‘palliative’ with someone who had a terminal disease and this type of care was to make the final days/weeks as comfortable as possible. So it was a bit of a shock to find out that my treatment was palliative in…
If there’s a word which is synonymous with cancer, it’s chemotherapy. It’s what most people have in their mind when they are talking to a cancer patient…… ‘have you had chemotherapy’ or ‘will you be getting chemotherapy’. I was nonchalantly asked by a friend some time ago ‘how did you get on with chemotherapy’ – he was surprised to hear I hadn’t had it despite my widespread disease. Cue – lengthy explanation…
I've made no secret of the fact that I don't believe Neuroendocrine Cancer is rare and you can read why in some detail in my blog Neuroendocrine Cancer - not as rare as you think. Even today people are quoting SEER figures dated 2004 for today's incidence rates. 'Do the math' please!
Meanwhile...... the figures from Public Health England (covering ~90% of UK), indicates there are now 4000…
In the last 12-24 months, there seems to have been announcement after announcement of new and/or upgraded/enhanced diagnostics and treatment types for Neuroendocrine Cancer. Scans, radionuclide therapies, combination therapies, somatostatin analogues, biological therapies, etc. Some of the announcements are just expansions of existing therapies having been approved in new (but significant) regions. Compared to some other…
