Why Do You Recommend Treating Mesothelioma With Chemotherapy and Surgery?
Patients who opt out of chemotherapy after surgery have worse outcomes, as a multi-modality approach involving surgery and chemotherapy is recommended. Chemotherapy is 50% effective after surgery, and surgery alone versus surgery and chemotherapy affects survival.
We do know that if you just get surgery alone versus surgery and chemotherapy, we do know that the survival is not as good. And now some of that is a bias in that some of those patients just may not live as long because they don't do well from the surgery because they never got they never made it to chemotherapy. With that being said, there are some patients in that subset that we looked at that did get surgery, but did not opt. They did not want to get chemotherapy. They were just you know, they were still healthy enough where we opted for it. We we offered it, but, you know, they they they felt that, it was just too much for them to handle, after surgery. And we know that those patients do worse. So whenever I counsel patients or especially on second opinions or first opinions, I tell them that it's always and it's a recurrent theme, but a multi modality approach where I don't just offer surgery. And that's why I have a medical oncologist on board with me is that, that that helps with me that that specializes in mesothelioma that you need surgery and chemotherapy. There has to be some and adjuvant therapy, whether it be immunotherapy, chemotherapy. But right now we know that chemotherapy, is fifty percent effective after surgery. So the idea of surgery and chemotherapy is really the most important. So if a patient comes to me and says, well, I'm never gonna be, you know, down for chemotherapy, I will try to tell them to really get them prepped and ready on that first visit that yeah, you're gonna have surgery. It's gonna be a big surgery, but you'll get through it. But afterwards, I'm I'm gonna want some chemotherapy regardless of what the pathology shows. We know that regardless of whether the pathology shows a lot of cancer, a little bit of cancer in lymph nodes, not lymph nodes, it is better to get chemotherapy, regardless of what stage you are with the surgery. So I do really have to spend some time with them, early on to tell them that. But again, most patients eventually, are okay with that. And so I think that we just really have to do, a good job of telling them it's not just surgery and done. It's surgery followed by chemotherapy, and then we, you know, can follow-up with other new experimental treatments down the road.
