Malignant Mesothelioma patients may have another weapon in the war against this awful, preventable, and deadly disease. It’s not a cure, not even a treatment, but if the results of a new study prove to be repeatable it may be a possible method to predict survivability.
All cases of mesothelioma are fatal. There is no cure and the disease will eventually take the sufferer’s life. However, anything that can make a patient’s remaining time a little more bearable is welcome when faced with the inevitable. This new test may do just that.
The study’s results, published in Cancer, Immunology, Immunotherapy show that chronic inflammation in a mesothelioma tumor’s stroma, the supportive tissue holding the tumor in place, is an independent predictor of prolonged survival in cases of epithelioid malignant pleural mesothelioma. In other words, those patients who experience this type of swelling tend to live longer.
Researchers discovered the link while looking for a prognostic tool they could use to judge the severity (via survival rate) of each individual mesothelioma case in order to more fully comprehend a patient’s options.
During the study, 175 epithelioid MPM specimens (microscopic slides) from one institution were reviewed again with researchers making note on the tumors’ level of acute and chronic inflammatory response. The individual tumor’s response was then graded on a scale and compared to the longevity of the patient from which the sample came.
When all the data was collected and the numbers crunched, researchers discovered that patients with high chronic inflammation of the tumor or the stroma surrounding the tumor had greatly improved survival rates compared to those mesothelioma patients with little inflammation. This difference carried all the way through the disease’s progression, even into stage III or IV patients.
True, this discovery will not lead to a cure. However, if the inflammation levels of current MPM patients are examined, doctors may now have a better understanding of just how long they will survive. This will help in choosing correct treatments and in the end of life planning for those afflicted with the disease.
Malignant pleural mesothelioma is the most aggressive and deadly form of mesothelioma. The disease is contracted by exposure to asbestos, usually through inhalation or ingestion, and is unfortunately always fatal. Most MPM patients are diagnosed after the disease has progressed into stage III or even stage IV. This is because mesothelioma has a latency period of up to 50 years—meaning patients could have been exposed to the asbestos that caused their condition decades before diagnosis.
Most traditional methods of treating mesothelioma include chemotherapy and surgery but new methods such as gene therapy and using laboratory-altered bacteria are currently being investigated.
Inflammation indicates an immune response at the tumor site. Given the close relationship between inflammation and survivability discovered here, lead researchers believe that further investigation into immunotherapy as a beneficial treatment for epithelioid MPM patients should be aggressively examined.