Deb had her latest MRI scan on 8 February (a normal MRI scan - her 31st since radiotherapy). The results from the scan were good. The tumour size, compared with the previous scan, was unchanged. There were none of the signs of activity as reported in the previous 2 or 3 scans. Whether the increased activity seen previously was real or not is not clear; in any case we can relax again.
On the 28 January, Deb and I attended a Brain Tumour Information Day organised by the Brain Tumour Charity. One of the speakers was Professor Cruickshank, Professor of Neurosurgery at the QE, During his talk he showed the above graph which gives an estimate, for patients with a glioblastoma tumour, of the numbers still living a certain amount of time after treatment. The red line is for patients who have radiotherapy alone and the blue line is for patients who receive radiotherapy and the chemotherapy drug temozolomide (like Deb). As you can see only about 20%, ie 1 in 5, patients will survive 3 years or more. What interested me was the fact that after 3 years the graph appeared to be flat which seems to imply that the number of deaths after 3 years is greatly reduced. I asked Dr Sanghera about this. What does the graph look like at 5, 6 or (like Deb) at 7 years? He said he didn't know; the research had not been done. What we do know is if you survive 5 years then your chances of surviving a further 5 years are greatly improved.
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