Posted on Tuesday, 7th September 2010 by Marcus Gollan
Nine years later, Brenda Coleman is cancer free.
She’s one of the 40,000 people diagnosed each year with pancreatic cancer — one of the deadliest cancers and hardest to beat.
“I believe at the time I think there was about a 2-percent chance of me surviving to five years,” Coleman said.
But research helped her become one of the very few to beat it. She was enrolled in a clinical trial testing the chemotherapy compound Gemcytoebeen — now a standard of care for pancreatic cancer.
At Mayo Clinic, she also benefited from advances to a 50-year-old surgery called the Whipple procedure, in which half the pancreas is spared and reconnected to the small intestine.
“So that the islet cells that make insulin can be preserved and continue to make adequate insulin for the patient,” said Dr. Michael Farnell, of Mayo Clinic.
Dr. Farnell said about 17 percent of patients whose pancreatic cancer is caught before it spreads to the lymph nodes are still alive five years later. But he said a real breakthrough is probably going to have to come from a lab like the one at Mayo.
“A breakthrough in chemotherapy or a breakthrough in diagnosis even before the cancer is clinically evident, before the patient has any symptoms at all,” Farnell said.
Coleman now devotes her free time to encouraging other cancer patients, making sure they know there is always hope.
“And I met a man then that was five years ahead of me and became very instrumental in my continuing to stay focused on surviving and believing that I could,” Coleman said.
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Tags: Cancers, Deadliest Cancers
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