This just confuses me. If there is no cancer in the body, then surely there’s nothing bad for the treatment to attack? So wouldn’t it just attack healthy parts of the body?
This just confuses me. If there is no cancer in the body, then surely there’s nothing bad for the treatment to attack? So wouldn’t it just attack healthy parts of the body?
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Remission doesn’t mean the cancer is gone, it just means the cancer is shrinking or has stopped spreading. Basically it just shows that the treatment is working, but doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re cured.
“Remission” usually means that cancer has been reduced or, in some cases, been eliminated, but generally that is because the cancer has responded to treatment. Remission doesn’t mean all cancerous cells are gone necessarily. Therefore, sometimes the treatment continues in some form, often lower strength, as a way to prevent it from increasing or coming back (in other words to help stop cells/eliminate them before they actually reach the cancerous stage).
The thing about cancer is that it tends to let tiny cancerous cells into the bloodstream and lymph, which will float away and then grow into a new tumor wherever it settles down. So you keep up some level of chemo/immunotherapy to try to take out as many of those potential cells as possible.
ie, that someone is probably not cancer free. Outside child cancer, cancer therapy is seldom about curing cancer. The goal is usually to attempt to make you live long enough that something else kills you (like a heart attack, stroke or kidney failure) before the cancer becomes a threat again.
Even if the cancer seems gone, treatment might continue just in case microscopic cancer is still hiding. But yes, if there’s really nothing left, the treatment could end up hurting healthy tissue. That is why doctors walk a tightrope between benefit and harm.
Chemo, for example, is a poison that kills cells that rapidly reproduce faster than it kills cells that divide slowly. Cancer is one of the types of cells killed because it is fast reproducting. But so are things like hair follicles and the lining of the stomach which leads to hair loss and severe nausea. It’s a poison that kills the cancer faster than it kills you.
Great question!
Not an oncologist, so hopefully one will weigh in…
When someone is in “remission” it doesn’t necessarily mean they have zero cancer cells at all, it just means there is low enough quantity of cancerous cells for it to be not detected on current tests and imaging modalities.
Continuing chemotherapy to kill the tiny amount of residual cancer cells or to prevent recurrence
Remission doesn’t mean that the cancer is gone. It has just lessened how strong it is.
It is basically taking a break from bugging its host. How long the break is is unknown so the treatment remains in place hoping it will keep the cancer from coming back.
Remission doesn’t necessarily mean that they are cancer-free. It means that many or all of the signs and symptoms have been eliminated. You can be in remission and still have cancerous cells within your body.
Also, generally speaking, cancerous cells are often able to spread to cells in other parts of your body. When you are undergoing chemotherapy, they have identified what type of cancer you have, and where it is within your body, and they continually test your body cells for cancer mutation rates as you undergo chemotherapy. Your cancerous cells may have spread to other parts of your body that they were not testing for originally, or they may have not detected enough cancerous cells to show a positive “infection” of cancer, but not have totally eliminated all cancerous cells, leaving a possibility that later on in life, the cancer may come back as those small number of cancerous cells have that were left undetected have continually spread and mutated other cells.
Hope this helps you understand.
My husband is currently in remission after being diagnosed and treated for acute leukemia and is on maintenance chemo pills for the next year. Because he was unable to find a bone marrow transplant match, the “factory” in his body that creates the cancer cells is still the same and the chances of the cancer cells returning are highest in the first year, so the chemo pills help to lessen that chance. Just because the cancer calls are gone doesn’t mean that the source of the cancer is gone/your body won’t create those cells again.
Remission / No Evidence of Disease often means that the cancer isn’t detectable in scans. A tumor too small to be seen can still contain millions of cancer cells.
This is especially the case for stage 4.
Remission usually means in morphological level the cancerous cells is gone or less than the threshold of abnormal. But in molecular level the drivers of disease is still present like presence of mutations or chromosomal abnormalities.
I received immunotherapy for nearly a year after I was declared NED. (no evidence of disease)
The way it was explained to me the immunotherapy unmasks the cancer cells so my immune system can clean them up on it’s own. Microscopic bits can be left over after chemo and radiation and the doctors can’t tell if they are there because they are microscopic, and they can grow into cancerous masses in the body and by then it is more brutal and expensive treatment or more surgery. Immunotherapy helps body to kill any cancerous cells that may pop up so metastasis cannot form, with luck that is. It is not always 100%.
My cancer is stage 4b, and it is treated as a chronic condition even though I have been NED for 3 years now. Remission is not used much anymore outside of some cancers, but it is pretty much the same as NED. I hope that helps.
Maintenance therapy, to decrease likelihood of reoccurrence. Some drugs cause hormone suppression, as the hormones are connected to the cancer proliferation.
Think of cancer as a handful of bad guys sneaking into a fortress. Once they’re inside, they’ll put on disguises and start sneaking more of their friends in through a hidden passage, until they can eventually take over and destroy the fortress.
Cancer treatment is about identifying the bad guys and stopping them, and remission is akin to sealing off the hidden passage they found; there’s no more coming inside at the moment, so your situation is no longer as urgent.
That said, there’s still a good chance a couple of the disguised bad guys are still in your fortress, and just ignoring them would mean it’s only a matter of time until they find or make a new hidden passage.
Continuing treatment is how you keep an eye out for those last ones.
Remission, as defined in the dictionary: a temporary diminution do the severity of disease or pain
So there you have it – it is gone for now but it can come back, and there is a decent chance it will.
The continued therapy/treatment prevents it from coming back by keeping the body in a state where the disease finds it difficult to grow or any initial re-growth is immediately dealt with.
remission means our horribly inaccurate and imprecise testing says you dont have cancer.