Living With Advanced Or Recurrent Endometrial Cancer: What Every Woman Should Know

“Your cancer is back”.

These are the most difficult words a cancer patient and their families would ever hear. It can trigger a flood of emotions, such as feeling overwhelmed, anxious or afraid. For patients and their families, cancer is not only a disease but a life-changing experience that alters their routines and relationships. For women, gynaecological cancers such as cervical, ovarian, or uterine often cause deep psychological distress. This wide range of emotions can be addressed by knowing about the disease and its treatment from your doctor or seeking professional help from counsellors.

Living With Endometrial Cancer: Things You Should Know

The life of a cancer patient depends on the stage at which their cancer is diagnosed. Endometrial cancer, which is the most common uterine cancer, begins in the cells of the inner lining of the uterus.

According to Dr Ashok Kumar Vaid, Chairman, Medical Oncology and Hematology and Stem Cell Transplant, Medanta Cancer Institute, Gurgaon, “If it is diagnosed at an early stage, the outcomes are often favourable. However, the story is very different when the disease comes back after treatment or is detected late, when it has reached its advanced stage.”

Types of Endometrial Cancer

Advanced endometrial cancer means the cancer has spread beyond the uterus to surrounding pelvic tissues or distant parts of the body, such as the lungs, liver, or bones.

Recurrent endometrial cancer is when the disease comes back after initial treatment. According to research published in the Journal of Gynecologic Oncology, in endometrial cancer patients, there is a 10-15 % chance of the cancer relapsing in early-stage disease, while it is 40 to 70 % in more advanced stages.

Also Read: Can Uterine Problems Affect Fertility? Expert Answers

Is It Possible To Identify Cancer Recurrence?

According to Dr Vaid, “Most of the recurrences can be identified due to new symptoms. The few symptoms to look out for are bleeding from the vagina, bladder, or rectum, decreased appetite, unexplained weight loss, pain in the pelvis, hips, belly, or back and reach out to the doctor as soon as they are noticed.”

A PubMed Central study shows that both advanced and recurrent endometrial cancer patients have had a poor prognosis and a treatment plan only centered on chemotherapy historically. Chemotherapy is the use of drugs to destroy cancer cells left after surgery or to shrink the cancer and slow the tumour's growth if it comes back or has spread to other parts of the body. Encouragingly, the treatment landscape is now evolving with precision medicine.

How Can Precision Medicine Help In the Prevention And Treatment Of Cancer?

“Precision medicine uses information about genes, proteins, and other factors to guide decisions about prevention, diagnosis, and treatment. For people with cancer, this involves examining how changes in certain genes or proteins within their cancer cells could influence their care and treatment options,” shares Dr Vaid.

Also Read: The Rise of Personalised Cancer Vaccines: A Game Changer For Treatment?

However, precision medicine has other applications as well. It can be used to detect certain cancers at an early stage, accurately identify the exact type of cancer, select the treatments and approaches most likely to be effective, and assess how well a treatment is working.

Traditionally, cancer has been treated using general, ‘one size fits all’ approaches such as chemotherapy, radiation, and surgical excision of tumours. These treatments vary widely in efficacy across individuals. The precision and personalised medicine approach is characterised by individualised treatments tailored to specific tissues, gene mutations, and personal factors relevant to each unique case of cancer.

Final Word

Summing up, Dr Vaid says, “By combining timely diagnosis, access to the right tests and treatments, and continued research into better therapies, the outlook for advanced and recurrent endometrial cancer is slowly but steadily improving.”