So that part of it has been a relief to me and I think to the doctors.
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The joy is easy to explain. Carter announced on December 6, 2015, that the cancer in his brain is gone.
In August, Carter, who won a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002, said his treatment of cancer would require him to avoid his public schedule. “I will continue to receive regular three-week immunotherapy treatments of pembrolizumab”, he added, referring to a common cancer drug.
Why, then, the dismay?
“So many cancer treatments can be effective in the short-term, causing tumors to shrink”, he said.
Shepard said immunotherapy treatments and cancer can be viewed the way you’d treat a patient with a chronic illness. I did reach out to Emory directly but they were not able to comment.
Early detection of Carter’s brain lesions also helped, as did the relatively small size and fortuitous location of the tumors, said Dr. Len Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.
Most cases of melanoma begin as a skin cancer, but Carter said this past summer that his doctors had not determined where his cancer originated. Still, he said, the news is encouraging for Carter.
They said when the former president received his diagnosis, he did not feel sorry for himself and instead handled it with no stress and went through all of his treatments. What we do know is that he had this tumor seven months ago, and in the past we would have expected to see progression of cancer in a rapid fashion, but his disease is extremely well controlled if not completely treated.
According to WebMD, in the past patients with melanoma that had spread to the brain could expect to live six to 12 months. And we’re really seeing a lot of people who are living a long, long time with either minimally detectable or no detectable cancer.
Immunotherapy drugs, rather than killing cancer cells, boost the immune system to do it instead. Immunotherapy, however, typically prolongs the life of cancer patients by about 1.5 years on the average. 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. So chances are very, very good that Jimmy Carter will continue to do well going forward and not have trouble with cancer in the future.
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While the new cancer therapies may not cure cancers, they can sometimes keep them under control for a long time.
