Is There a Better Way for Doctors to Evaluate a Mesothelioma Patient's Response to Treatment?

In June 2012, a graduate student named Zacariah Labby submitted his doctoral dissertation to the Committee on Medical Physics at the University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. For the past five years, he had worked under world-renowned mesothelioma experts Dr. Samuel Armato and Dr. Hedy Lee Kindler. While studying mesothelioma response evaluation models, he noticed a big problem. Some patients who doctors thought were getting better passed away before patients whose disease was progressing. This led Labby to believe that current criteria may not accurately determine a mesothelioma patient's response. Doctors may accidentally misclassify stable tumors as progressive, unnecessarily limiting the patient's treatment options. Labby then launched a study to optimize the classification criteria. He rearranged patients in categories until there was an improved correlation between image-based response and patient survival. Based on his optimized criteria, just over 22 percent of the patients in Labby's study were originally misclassified. His findings will appear in the November issue of the Journal of Thoracic Oncology. Problems with the Current Mesothelioma Evaluation Models Most doctors use CT scans to evaluate a mesothelioma tumor's response to treatment. They also measure the thickness of the tumor, then classify patients as having either responsive, stable or progressive disease. The standard rules say that if a tumor decreases by more than 30 percent, the patient has ...
Source: Asbestos and Mesothelioma News - Category: Environmental Health Authors: Tags: Treatment & Doctors Source Type: news