Word: chronical
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...tolerable way, often with drugs that are taken for the rest of the patient's life. "There was a mind shift that happened in the 1980s," says Dr. John Glaspy, professor of medicine at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "We realized that there is a power in the chronic-disease model where you can focus on a high quality of living with a disease instead of necessarily curing it. If we can have people alive, productive and happy, that's now viewed as a very wonderful outcome...
...with the things you were doing yesterday," as Edwards put it in a 60 Minutes interview. Reason: in recent years the treatment of what used to be dismissed as terminal cancer has shifted from a win-or-lose battle against acute illness to something more akin to managing a chronic disease - in many cases with extended periods of feeling just fine, thanks...
...Breast cancer is the model for treating cancer as a chronic disease, largely because it's the focus of so much research and drug development. "We have a ton of drugs that work for breast cancer - eight or nine - more than for any other cancer," says Dr. Christy Russell, co-director of the Norris Breast Center at the University of Southern California. The approach for someone with metastatic disease like Elizabeth Edwards, says Russell, is to use a drug until it stops working - as it almost inevitably will - and then switch to something else, possibly buying years of relatively good...
...Gleevec reversed the odds for patients suffering from two rare cancers - chronic myelogenous leukemia and gastrointestinal stromal tumors - for which there had been no effective treatments. In a matter of months, patients who were out of options had their lives back, and while their cancer was not cured, it was under control, at least for a while. Other new drugs, including Tarceva and Iressa, also halt tumor growth by messing with tyrosine kinase. The key to developing such drugs, says Glaspy, is "torturing cancer cells, and getting them to confess to us which pathways they are dependent...
...don’t have to deal with the security checks, guest sign-in procedures, and restrictions on visitors that other universities in the Boston area impose on their undergraduates, and that’s great indeed. The obvious flip-side of our openness, of our superiors’ chronic reassurances, and the alacrity with which we approach the advisories in our inboxes, is that we tend to think we’re far safer than we actually are. That’s not a good thing, for the people whom we hurt the most, with our inflated estimations...