Survival time grows for cancer patients like Snow
Last Updated: 2007-03-28 13:26:41 -0400 (Reuters Health)
By Will Dunham
WASHINGTON - More tools than ever are available to help patients like White House press secretary Tony Snow whose colon cancer has spread, but his situation is extremely serious, doctors said on Tuesday.
"We used to measure the survival time for people with advanced colon cancer in terms of months. Now we do it in terms of years. And that is a shift," Dr. Robert Mayer of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, a past president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said in an interview.
Medical advances since the early 1990s have given more hope to such patients. New drugs like Avastin, approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 2004, are valuable weapons against colon cancer that has metastasized, or spread to other parts of the body.
Nevertheless, these patients on average live only about two years after the cancer spreads, according Dr. Harmon Eyre, chief medical officer for the American Cancer Society.
"If we're talking about the median (survival time after diagnosis) being 26 or 27 months, somewhere in that range, it means half the people live longer. And some of those people live for five years. And some of them even longer than that," Mayer added.
Colon cancer starts in the large intestine or rectum. The American Cancer Society said it is the second-leading cause of U.S. cancer deaths and is forecast to kill about 52,000 Americans this year.
But colon cancer deaths have been declining for the past 15 years, the group said, in part because more polyps -- small growths that can be a precursor of cancer -- are being detected by screening techniques and removed before they can develop into cancer and also because treatments have improved.
Snow, 51, survived a bout with colon cancer in 2005, having his colon removed and undergoing six months of chemotherapy. White House spokesman Dana Perino said Snow underwent surgery on Monday to have a growth in his abdomen removed. Perino said the growth turned out to be cancerous and that the cancer had spread to other parts of the body, including his liver.
Perino said Snow vowed to aggressively fight the disease, with chemotherapy likely and other treatments possible.
Mayer said that there was basically one effective drug available from the 1950s to the mid-1990s for such patients. Since then, Mayer said, several new drugs have appeared, including new chemotherapy agents and drugs like Avastin, a so-called monoclonal antibody sold by Genentech Inc. that interferes with the growth of cancer cells.
"People with advanced disease are living quite a bit longer. And even though one would have to say that the likelihood is that Mr. Snow's disease is not curable, there also is a very strong likelihood that it will respond to chemotherapy and that he will do well for a good period of time," Mayer said.
When cancer spreads from one organ to another, it is known as Stage IV cancer. Oncologist Dr. Allyson Ocean of NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center said this is a very serious development. Cells that are able to spread tend to be more aggressive cancer cells, Ocean said.
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