“How is endometrial cancer treated?”
My mom has been diagnosed with endometrial cancer. She is 78 years old so I am so nervous about treatment due to her age. What is normally done for older cancer patients?
3 Answers
A complicated set of attractive options. Options should be reviewed with a expert physician critically. This is both a sometimes curable disease and the treatment depends on the stage. For early stages the treatment is surgery or radiotherapy and sometimes a sequence of the two adjuvant further therapy after ideal above is experimental.
Be sure to have an adequate biopsy to allow genomic proteomic tumor testing now or in future. In theory ideally don't go into RT without adequate tissue for future. Chemo before or during RT are research and very few (too few)patients clearly need the extra regarding advanced stages role of chemotherapy.
This can be curative so the argument favors best standard therapy. Endometrial is very much like ovarian but maybe actually much better in terms of drug medical options. Taxol Carbo are the standard taxol weekly rather than intermittent an option. In theory any schedule closest to the ideal delivered dose rate that meets comfort so called dose limiting tolerance works. There are modifications that fit the elderly and even the resistant or ineligible for one drug
Be sure to have an adequate biopsy to allow genomic proteomic tumor testing now or in future. In theory ideally don't go into RT without adequate tissue for future. Chemo before or during RT are research and very few (too few)patients clearly need the extra regarding advanced stages role of chemotherapy.
This can be curative so the argument favors best standard therapy. Endometrial is very much like ovarian but maybe actually much better in terms of drug medical options. Taxol Carbo are the standard taxol weekly rather than intermittent an option. In theory any schedule closest to the ideal delivered dose rate that meets comfort so called dose limiting tolerance works. There are modifications that fit the elderly and even the resistant or ineligible for one drug
Hysterectomy. Depending on depth of cancer into the endometrium, a "Radical Hysterectomy" along with the removal of the vaginal cuff and removal of both ovaries
If she only had a D & C to diagnose the cancer, she needs a imaging study and / or a complete examination by a gynecologic oncologist to determine the extent of the cancer. Most endometrial cancer is treated by total hysterectomy, oophorectomy and pelvic node sampling first. Depending upon the reports of pathology radiation and occasionally chemo is given. However most endometrial cancer is discovered at an early stage. But the complete evaluation must be done to determine the extent of cancer.
