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DiscussionPancreatic Cancer with Mets to the Liver: Lost and wondering!
Pancreatic Cancer | Last Active: Jun 12 7:38am | Replies (21)Comment receiving replies
Replies to "Yes. Gem+nab-pacli regimen"
Hello Anindita, I'm sorry to hear about your father. If it is only one lesion or a couple, they could potentially try radiation on that area of the liver. There are also a lot of minimally invasive techniques like Y90 or ablation to remove the lesion safely, as long as it is only one or a few lesions. The only downside of doing radiation or minimally invasive techniques is that they don't prevent new lesions from coming back on the liver or in other parts of the body as well. They only get rid of the disease on that particular spot. Chemo, on the other hand, could potentially kill the cancer cells all over the body and prevent it from spreading for as long as the chemo works for. Assuming your Dad is in otherwise good health and wants aggressive treatment, I would recommend you ask your doctors to do some interventional work on the liver to get rid of the new lesions and then do chemo under the new gem+nab regime right after. I also will add that it is super important that you do genetic testing on your father's tumor in order to see if it has any unique mutations or fusions that can be targeted by different types of medicines. Lastly, please make sure you are at a top cancer hospital, as they have all the latest techniques and options. Regular hospitals just give you the textbook answers and are generally much less aggressive with treatment. I wouldn't be surprised if you get pushback from your doctors advising you not to do the liver specific treatment because they'll say if the chemo works, it will kill the liver lesions, so what is the point of the liver intervention. The only downside of the liver intervention is that you don't have a lesion to measure if the chemo regime is working. If you start chemo when there is no visible cancer in the body, you don't know if the chemo is working. But on the other hand, if you don't do the liver intervention and the chemo doesn't work, you might lose the chance to do liver-specific treatment because you can't do that treatment if there are many lesions on the liver. If you want to be aggressive, tell them you still want to do the liver intervention and chemo after, and then see what happens. If the next chemo regime works well, then for the time being everything will be stable. Moreover, there are some doctors out there that claim they can test tumor cells in a lab to see which chemo has the best response to those cells. Most doctors say this is complete nonsense, while a few claim massive success with it. If you are interested, you can potentially try it out. I'm so sorry you are going through this and unfortunately, there is no "good" answer here. It all depends on how aggressive you want to be and how much your Dad can withstand in terms of side effects. I've been in your shoes and I know how tough it can be. I wish you all the best.