suddenseizure

I wouldn't call radiation non invasive, it ages the surrounding brain tissue a lot.

For people with faster growing tumors like GBM the tumor will usually kill them before the side effects of radiation hit.

But for people with slower growing tumors like oligodendroglioma, the side effects of radiation can force them to quit their job and go on disability, years before they actually die of the cancer.

The better we get at treating these tumors and extending patients' lives, the more important it will be to avoid radiation as long as possible to ensure that extra quantity of life also has quality.

Because my wife has cancer and I don't want our kids to grow up without their mom.

A cure for cancer. That's something no amount of money can currently buy.

Yes, we are relatively lucky that it's a low grade glioma. Sorry to hear about your dad, GBM is a monster.

The oncologist told us life expectancy is around 15 years which, while ~10x better than GBM, is a pretty disappointing thing to hear when you're in your early thirties. But that number comes from looking back at people diagnosed in recent decades, so we're really hoping that new treatments will change the equation going forward.

I've been following this field with great interest since my wife was diagnosed with brain cancer.

It seems many types of cancer can evolve resistance to treatment with a single type of immunotherapy. Similar to how HIV quickly evolved resistance to treatment by one ARV (antiretroviral).

But HIV can be kept in check by a cocktail of 3 ARVs simultaneously. And there's some recent research from Mass General where they managed to eradicate brain tumors in mice using 3 different immunotherapies simultaneously: https://advances.massgeneral.org/neuro/journal.aspx?id=1263

> Dr. Curry's group describes "a likely oversimplified, but reasonable" summary of the mechanism of the triple therapy: GVAX expands the number and diversity of activated tumor-specific T cells and increases the number of intratumor CD8+ T cells, while PD-1 inhibition further invigorates the effects of those mobilized cells. Meanwhile, agonist anti-OX40 continues to skew systemic and tumor microenvironments toward Th1 immunity, suppress regulatory T cells and prevent T cell exhaustion.

Hopefully this is a way forward for treating humans too!

There is no way to make sure, nothing in life is "sure", especially not the random mutations that cause cancer.

Just eat healthy, exercise, enjoy life, and tell people you love them while you can.

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As I understand it, most chemotherapy targets only dividing cells. In adult humans there are relatively few of these: cancer cells (which you want to kill), bone marrow (produces blood cells, so you have to monitor blood cell counts during chemo), and reproductive organs (produce gametes, so you may want to freeze sperm/eggs before chemo).

The downside with adaptive immune system therapy (like CAR-T therapy) is that it doesn't work as well with cancers with fewer mutations that the T cell can detect as anomalous.

My wife has brain cancer and has been reading about all the immunotherapies available. Unfortunately brain cancer tends to have much fewer mutations than say, lung cancer. However there are innate immune system therapies being researched that might be more promising in those cases.

IVF babies aren't guaranteed to be infertile, they just have a slightly higher chance of it (because of selection bias in the parents).

My wife and I might well have babies via IVF because she can't get pregnant while on chemotherapy - but that doesn't mean we carry any infertility genes. She just had the bad luck to have some cells mutate into cancer.

My wife went for routine blood tests yesterday and they didn't even bother to tell her that the insurance her employer switched to in 2017 treats this lab as out of network (it was in network with the previous insurance just a week ago). She could have gone to an in network lab a few blocks away if they'd told her. Now we're worried about a huge unnecessary out of network bill in addition to the in network deductible / max out of pocket we were expecting to hit with her cancer treatment.

I don't think it's as easy as you portray it. To "cure death", you have to cure every thing that can go wrong with you.

Look at just once thing that can go wrong with you: cancer. There are huge amounts of money poured into cancer research around the world.

But I don't even know if my wife, only 30 years old but recently diagnosed with cancer, will live long enough for us to have kids and see them grow up.

I wish you strength and courage too. My wife was recently diagnosed with a brain tumor (had no idea until I woke up to her having a seizure in bed next to me) and my previous world, all our plans, have shattered. The horrible thing about brain cancer is that radiation degrades you mentally very quickly. So we are thinking of opting for chemo only for now. Hoping that the quality vs quantity of life trade-off is worth it. Praying for a miracle cure before radiation is necessary.

We were planning to have kids in the next year or so. Now we're doing fertility preservation in case the chemo makes her infertile. I'm wondering if I can cope as a single dad if things come to that. I have a good paying tech job but everything in the Bay Area is so expensive, especially with kids.