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Throat cancer treatment seeks to limit radical side effects
August 4, 1996
Web posted at: 12:20 p.m. EDTFrom Correspondent Dan Rutz
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Gerry Engeholm's teaching career was on the line that day six years ago when he learned he had cancer near the back of his tongue. He got the word by phone, and recalls that the doctor pulled no punches.
"And he said, 'we'll probably have to cut some of your tongue out and remove your voice box,'" Engeholm recalls. "'... and we have to do this right away.'"
The results would mean serious problems speaking and eating.
As blunt as it sounds, the doctor was laying down a standard treatment plan for cancers like Engeholm's. But this patient got a second opinion and another option from Dr. Louis Harrison at New York's Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.
Harrison's alternative treatment uses extremely localized high doses of radiation, and appears to be as effective as surgery -- with far fewer side effects.
The six-month treatment plan preserves both tongue and larynx. Only the cancerous lymph nodes are removed. The rest of the cancer is treated with chemotherapy and radiation, first from the outside, and then from the inside by radioactive beads threaded through spaghetti-thin tubes.
The tubes are in place for about a week. It looks brutal, but it's temporary compared to losing the tongue and larynx forever in the standard operation.
"Here's a patient who has two options that would have probably given him the same rate of cure," Harrison says, "but the difference in quality of life from one option versus the other is so dramatically different."
Engeholm is among the 80 percent of patients who are free of cancer five years later. The cure rate is about the same for radical surgery. And while the surgical process is much shorter, it comes with a greater sacrifice.
"What would it have been like without a voice," muses Engeholm. "What would it have been not being able to eat properly?"
Such questions have helped bring about new priorities in cancer treatments -- saving lives without ruining them.
Related stories:
- Some throat cancer victims can skip voice box surgery, study says- July 3, 1996
- Cigars: New smoking chic, old smoking risks?- June 10, 1996
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