Mesothelioma Survival Rate

Video Transcript

"The survival in patients with mesothelioma still is quite poor. Median survival is approximately one year. Part of the reason for this are that many patients diagnosed with this are in their sixties and seventies, they have other co-morbidities, other lung diseases, heart diseases, possibly other cancers, which make them less appropriate candidates for aggressive treatment. Part of it is even after aggressive treatment, tri-modality treatment which entails an extra pleura pneumonectomy, which is again the removal of the entire lung with it's plural coverings, part of the diaphragm, and part of the covering of the heart, what's called the pericardium. Followed by aggressive chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. Even after this patients are recurring. So what this is telling us is we need better systemic treatments to minimize the risk of recurrence. So despite the best efforts of the oncology community today survival of mesothelioma is still quite poor. There is a small subset of patients with mesothelioma that typically the epithelioid subtype who if they have the disease completely re-sected, and if the surgical margin is the boundary of the surgical specimen does not contain tumor cells. And if there is no evidence of lymph node involvement in the center of the chest those patients can approach fifty percent, five year survival. That is unfortunately a fairly small subset of these patients."