What Are Treatment Goals for Bladder Cancer?
What Are Treatment Goals for Bladder Cancer? from Patient Empowerment Network on Vimeo.
Dr. Shilpa Gupta from the Cleveland Clinic defines bladder cancer treatment goals and shares advice for patients when making treatment decisions with their healthcare team.
Dr. Shilpa Gupta is the Director of the Genitourinary Medical Oncology at Taussig Cancer Institute and Co-Leader of the Genitourinary Oncology Program at Cleveland Clinic. Dr. Gupta’s research interests are novel drug development and understanding biomarkers of response and resistance to therapies in bladder cancer. Learn more about Dr. Gupta, here.
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Transcript:
Katherine:
Now that we know more about bladder cancer and how it’s staged, let’s move on to treatment. What are the goals of treatment for bladder cancer?
Dr. Gupta:
The goals of treatment depend on what stage the disease is in. For patients who have non-muscle invasive cancer, we use the oldest immunotherapy that is out there called BCG.
The goal is to prevent recurrence and prevent progression to muscle invasion. Many times, despite treatment that may not happen and that’s when patients need their bladder out. I would say that the goal for treatment for localized disease is to cure the disease and prevent distant recurrences and prolong survival. The goals of treatment with metastatic disease are to improve survival and delay progression-free survival, improve response rates.
Katherine:
What do you feel is the patient’s role in treatment decisions?
Dr. Gupta:
I think patients are the key we center everything around for treatments, right? There are so many treatment options and it’s really very difficult to make a decision without getting the patient’s perspective.
What are the patient’s goals from their lives and what they see the cancer as? For example, if somebody has muscle-invasive disease and the cancer is not very big and the patient has the option of getting the bladder removed which means they will have a stoma for the rest of their lives, or they can reclaim their bladder after undergoing radiation and chemotherapy and still undergo cystoscopies, or looking inside the bladder, every three months.
Some patients just don’t want a stoma no matter what, so we try to tailor the therapies according to that and a lot, many times, patients – these are older patients, they may have a lot of comorbidities, they may not be the most fit patients to undergo a big procedure, so we have to tailor it according to the patient. I think the patient’s role is what we all strive to go by.
What is a good treatment for one patient may not be a good treatment for another patient.
