My apologies for the long break in posting any information, but I was holding out for my final imaging (Echocardiogram and Mammogram) to determine where I stand after this long 525 days from diagnosis to no evidence of disease (NED)! I am not "cured" and I am not "cancer free". Close but not exact is in remission. The correct description is called no evidence of disease (NED).
I like the way this website from Brown Health explains the difference. It is written by an MD.
No Evidence of Disease (NED)
"No evidence of disease” or, NED, is a term I use frequently, meaning there is no evidence of visible or detectable disease at the moment. The best example is when a patient who had cancer has repeated imaging and/or bloodwork drawn for tumor markers and neither demonstrates any findings of recurrent malignancy."
Remission
"When I tell a patent they are in “remission,” I typically mean that following a treatment (surgery, definitive radiation, chemoradiation, and/or chemotherapy) there is:
- No evidence of visible disease on medical imaging.
- I have a reasonable expectation that it won’t come back.
- But they have risk for recurrence within a specified period, typically five years." (For me it is 10 years, due to my age)
Cancer-Free/Cured
"I don’t think I would use “cancer-free” until I was ready to say that someone is cured."
In other words, I achieved the best situation I could achieve in my situation with the type of cancer I have. My ongoing cancer treatment is Tamoxifen for 2-3 years and an Aromatase Inhibitor for 7-8 years for a total of 10 years of hormone suppression. I've posted on this before but to elaborate:
- Tamoxifen is a hormone blocker. It is a selective estrogen receptor modulator (SERM) that blocks the effects of estrogen in breast tissue. Tamoxifen prevents estrogen from binding to receptors in breast cancer cells, which inhibits their growth and proliferation. This makes it an effective treatment for hormone-positive breast cancer.
- Aromatase inhibitors are a type of hormone therapy used to treat breast cancer, especially in postmenopausal women. They work by blocking the enzyme aromatase, which turns the hormone androgen into small amounts of estrogen in the body. By reducing estrogen levels, they can help to slow or stop the growth of breast cancer cells that rely on estrogen for survival.
