Host Amber Smith: Here's some expert advice from Dr. Jason Wallen from Upstate Medical University. How often does lung cancer recur after treatment?
Jason Wallen, MD: Recurrence, to use that word, is really dependent on the stage. And so, one of the things I like to tell my patients is that cancer never recurs. Either they get a new cancer or the old cancer was never gone. Andthe reason that they quote unquote recur, that they reappear, is because they were there at the time of the operation was completed. We just weren't able to detect it. And there are of course, limits to our technology to be able to stage or detect cancer and other areas of the body. And so what staging really does is it predicts what is the chance that there's cancer somewhere else that we haven't detected yet? And so for example, a patient with stage two lung cancer, usually we take that patient to surgery because we think there's a good chance we can remove everything, but there's also, we know, a very good chance that there's something else out there that we haven't seen yet because it's microscopic and it's just too small to be seen on any of our scans. And that's the logic, if you will, for why things like chemotherapy are helpful in those patients is because it can clean up that microscopic disease that may be elsewhere in the body. And so, to answer your question more specifically, the higher the clinical stage, or the stage that we determined at the outset of treatment is, the more likely the cancer is to show up somewhere else at some later time.
Host Amber Smith: You've been listening to Dr. Jason Wallen, medical director of the thoracic oncology program at Upstate Medical University.