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What is the chance of an 83-year old surviving chemotherapy?
My grandpa has a tumor in his stomach but there is a possibility that it may have spread to the lungs. If it did spread, then surgery cannot be done to solve the problem. Would he be able to handle chemotherapy? He has asthma and has well controlled diabetes.
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#3 written by taximomuv3 2 years ago
If it has spread to the lungs, they won’t do much of anything unfortunately. Your grandfather has lived a long life – you don’t want him to spend the time he has left sick as a dog from chemotherapy. This is a quality of life issue – spend as much time with him as you can, ask questions and have him tell you stories of when he was younger – write them down and cherish every minute.
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“Chemotherapy” is a general term for many very different treatments. There are more than 75 chemotherapy drugs and hundreds of different combinations. If this is gastric carcinoma metastatic to lung, the regimens commonly used should pose no great risk of mortality, but gastric cancers that have spread beyond surgery are not likely to be cured.
What happens so often is that people eventually die of their malignant diseases – while they are on chemotherapy regimens. People often misinterpret the death as caused by the chemotherapy rather than the fact that the cancer was progressing and caused death.
It is difficult to stop chemotherapy for many patients in the U.S.
People think we are giving up on them. Many hundreds of times I have tried to gently explain that treatment was not working or no longer working and we should stop. It takes a great deal of time to convince people that no treatment – after chemotherapy is no longer working – is the best way to go. Explaining things carefully for patients and their families is an important role for oncology specialists in my opinion.
I will expect the thumbs down from people who think that “chemotherapy” killed their loved ones. Chemotherapy of all types weakens patients and should not be continued if the cancer is clearly growing despite treatment. Chemotherapy for placebo effect or just to be “doing something” is not a good idea in my opinion. It also increases the cost of health care without providing benefit.
BUT – for an 83 year old in good shape with a metastatic gastric carcinoma (if you prove that he has malignancy in the lungs), it is usually worth a try with follow-up studies to asses if it is helping reduce the tumor burden – for awhile. You can always stop the treatments if the side effects are not tolerable or the tumor is not responsive. Every person is different. Every malignancy is different. The only way to know if treatment will help is to try – and then assess the effects. Patients do not have to agree to anything more than one cycle of treatment at a time.