Charles Jiang, Medical Oncologist at UT Southwestern Medical Center, shared Elizabeth Nally’s, Medical Oncology SpR at Barts Health, post on X, adding:
“Huge congratulations to Dr Elizabeth Nally and the Barts team on this. Wonderful and necessary work, and worth a moment to say why it lands.
Adjuvant therapy always means treating three baskets of patients at the same time, and on the day we decide they look identical to us.
- Basket one: Patients the surgery already cured.
- Basket two: Patients who will recur regardless of what we add.
- Basket three: The few whose microscopic disease the drug can truly eradicate.
Only the third basket benefits. The other two absorb the toxicity, the cost, and a year of life lived as a patient, all for no return. And basket one, the already cured, is usually the largest group in the room.
The whole problem is that we have no crystal ball to tell who is who. So every push to treat earlier or longer carries the same hidden trade.
There will always be patients who do well no matter what we do, and for them we are adding only harm. Studies like this one, which measure that harm from the patient’s side rather than ours, are exactly how the field stays honest as it chases cure.”
Quoting Elizabeth Nally’s post:
“Thank you Cristiane D Bergerot for highlighting our abstract!
Looking forward to presenting our work at ASCO next week and contributing to the important conversation around long-term toxicity, quality of life and patient experience following adjuvant immunotherapy in RCC.”
Title: Decision regret and toxicity perception following adjuvant pembrolizumab in renal cell carcinoma.
Author: Elizabeth Nally
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