Dr. Michael Poch, a urologic oncologist specializing in bladder cancer, explains the many factors that go into determining a bladder cancer treatment plan. Dr. Poch reviews how your cancer’s stage and grade, overall health, lifestyle, and personal priorities all factor into selecting the best treatment approach.
Dr. Michael Poch is a urologic oncologist specializing in bladder cancer and prostate cancer at Moffitt Cancer Center. Learn more about Dr. Poch.
Related Resources
Transcript
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Poch, what factors are considered when choosing a bladder cancer treatment?
Dr. Michael Poch:
I think that there’s a lot. Again, it depends on stage and grade. So, if we’re talking about low-risk or low-grade tumors, we want to know about the patient’s overall function.
We want to know how far away they live from where we’re potentially going to treat them because certain treatments can be given less frequently or more frequently. We want to know about the patient’s underlying or other medical conditions which may impact our ability to do certain things. Patients may not be able to tolerate having a big surgery to remove their bladders, and patients may not want to have that big surgery to remove their bladder. They may be candidates for radiation treatment. They may not. So, it really depends on some of those other factors. So, it’s important to understand where the patient’s coming from and what their desires are. What their concerns are. What they factor and how heavily they weigh quality of life or certain aspects of their quality of life, as well.
Katherine Banwell:
Dr. Poch, can you define personalized medicine for our audience?
Dr. Michael Poch:
Well, personalized medicine takes a lot of different factors. We talk about personalizing on the tissue-based level. So, there are some cases where we can actually use different algorithms to evaluate whether the tumor itself may be more responsive to one treatment or the other. We also personalize the approach based upon clinical factors. A patient may again have really bad bladder symptoms and may not even want to keep their bladder anymore. Whereas certain patients say, “You’re never going to take my bladder out no matter what.” And that’s sort of personalizing the clinical approach. But there’s also some lab work that we can do which adds a personalized aspect to some of those things regarding genetic testing and checking blood tests to look at some of the genetic evaluations, as well.