Buffalo, NY (WBEN) This week, Rush Limbaugh announced on his program his lung cancer has reached stage four. An area doctor says there is hope for stage four patients.
"What that means is lung cancer has spread to organs outside the chest," says Dr. Sai Yendamuri of Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center. "Why it's sometimes called terminal cancer, is because it's not considered curable when it's stage four." He says there are some cancers that can through therapies.
Yendamuri says there's no specific timeline for time left to live with a stage four diagnosis. "Six months, 12 months are statistical numbers based on a large number of patients, but that doesn't apply to one particular patient. How long one particular patient lives depends on a number of factors like the nature of the stage four cancer and how they're responding to treatment," says Yendamuri, who notes those undergoing immunotherapy live a long time with stage four cancer.
Related
Yendamuri says the first thing stage four patients should know is there is hope for responsive treatment, living life with a good quality of life, and months, if not years to live. "I think hope is very important, and physicians who treat this condition do this first," says Yendamuri. He adds doctors then talk about treatment along with counseling with patients.
Yendamuri says there are plenty of treatments for stage four patients. "A few years ago, we had options of chemotherapy to target mutations. Then, the latest advance was immunotherapy, and we have markers to determine who well a patient is responding," says Yendamuri, who adds new treatments are developed every few months.