Word: snow
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Sometimes it takes a stricken celebrity or two to bring home a new truth about a disease. In the course of a few days, both Elizabeth Edwards, wife of Presidential candidate John Edwards, and White House spokesman Tony Snow revealed that they are not just battling recurrences of cancer but also contending with malignancies that have spread and are no longer curable. Many Americans were stunned to hear that the Edwardses will continue their quest for the White House, with Elizabeth campaigning despite metastatic breast cancer. Snow, who was treated for colon cancer two years ago and now has tumor...
...Snow's case, doctors removed his colon in 2005, and treated him with chemotherapy to eliminate any remaining cells and contain satellite growths that might have broken off from the primary tumor. After undergoing surgery to remove a growth from his right pelvic area, doctors discovered additional growths in his liver. According to Dr. Raymond DuBois, incoming provost of MD Anderson Cancer Center and a colon cancer specialist, it's not unusual to see additional growths several months or years following such a procedure. "Any time a patient comes in with a big tumor, we always worry about micrometastatic lesions...
...Fortunately, patients like Snow have more options today than ever. Until 10 years ago, there was only one drug, a chemotherapy agent, available to treat colon cancer, and it wasn't very effective. In the past decade, more chemotherapy drugs, which are easier on the body, and new classes of targeted therapies, which specifically block a tumor's ability to recruit growth factors and blood vessels, have improved the survival of patients...
...containing colon cancer in people like Snow is the ability to detect recurrent tumors. Current imaging tests including MRI and PET scans may not pick up the small micrometastases that seed repeat growths; PET scans rely on the tumor's voracious appetite for glucose for energy, but until the tumor's activity reaches a certain threshold, it won't show up on the scan. So researchers are working on finding protein markers in the blood released by tumor cells that spread outside the colon; experts believe that cancer cells that venture outside the original tumor are equipped with special markers...
...cured this way. About 30% of colon cancer patients, however, are diagnosed with the disease after it has progressed to more advanced stages, and spread to other organs such as the liver. "The one important message for everyone is that you don't have to go through what Tony Snow is [going through]," says DuBois...