The former president apparently shared the good news on Sunday with those filling the congregation of Maranatha Baptist Church for one of his regular Sunday school lessons.
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Carter, 91, announced Sunday that doctors found no evidence of the four lesions discovered on his brain this summer and no signs of new cancer growth. Philip Wise, a pastor long active in CBF leadership, died in 2009 less than a year after being diagnosed with metastatic melanoma.
So what exactly does it mean to be “cancer-free”? “One hopes that by using immunotherapy the body can respond to whatever happens but cancer cells are clever and can develop workarounds for the various treatments”.
The Food and Drug Administration gave Keytruda accelerated approval in 2014 for patients, like Carter, whose melanoma has spread.
However, Lichtenfeld cautions that Carter hasn’t just received immunotherapy. However, the immune system has a harder time identifying cancer cells as foreign, sometimes due to the fact that they don’t appear different enough from normal cells or the immune system isn’t powerful enough to take on the cancer.
While Carter’s clean bill of health is very good news, Shepard said it’s too early to call it “a cure”.
Oncologists are concerned about giving chemotherapy drugs to older cancer patients because of the toxicity issues, which can cause nausea and fatigue. Despite some apparently permanent debilitating side effects, ranging from chemo-induced neuropathy in both feet to a form of radiation enteritis and altered blood-cell counts, I’m incredibly lucky. “I haven’t been uncomfortable or ill after the treatments were over”.
“He had a relatively low tumor burden that was treatable”, Lichtenfeld said. Dr. Douglas Johnson, a melanoma specialist at Vanderbilt-Ingram Cancer Center, said such a process is repeated every three months in the first year after a clean scan comes up.
Carter served as the 39th President of the United States from 1977 to 1981.
Despite the diagnosis, Carter continued to volunteer, working to build homes for Habitat for Humanity, an organization he’s been involved with since 1984.
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Making the drugs affordable needs to be addressed, too, he added.
