Stage 4 colon cancer

[kyounge1956]

Do you have a link, and is only for breast cancer, or the colon cancer and others as well.

Did you mean a link to the forum I mentioned? It's called breastcancer.org, and is specifically for breast cancer although some other types do come up occasionally because of the inherited types of breast cancer, because breast cancer is sometimes caused by treatment earlier in life for other cancers (specifically chest radiation for Hodgkins lymphoma IIRC) and because at least one drug (tamoxifen) which is used to treat breast cancer can itself cause endometrial cancer. There is an informational website as well as the discussion groups. If you meant the clinical trials site, it's called breastcancertrials.org and is also specifically for breast cancer, but I would imagine there are similar sites to find clinical trials for other kinds of cancer.

It seems that the latest data claims that there are a variety of "abnormalities" within the particular cancer cell, and each of these has an affect on the effectiveness of the particular drug or treatment. Do these upcoming clinical trails indicate which abnormalities and strains of cancer cells that they are targeting?

Some of the new drugs currently in clinical trials are aimed at breast cancers with specific genetic characteristics, but I think the research on genetic pathways that are similar across several different types of cancer is too recent for any clinical trials which are testing treatments on the basis of that new information to have been completed. To the best of my memory, I've only heard this personalized medicine, as it is called—that is, basing a patient's treatment on the genetic nature of their specific cancer cells—spoken of as something that is coming in the near future, not something that already exists. Also, the same research that is discovering which genetic pathways have gone wrong in order to convert normal cells to cancerous ones has also revealed that even within the same tumor, the cells are not all alike. Cancer cells can continue to mutate over time and that is one reason various treatments tend to stop working after a while.

I think that although different chemo drugs target different cancer cells, a drug used for breast cancer would also stop the growth of a colon tumor if not shrinking it. This would make the internal bleeding stop, and render the fecal test ineffective. A colonoscopy would still spot a tumor, but the prep may not be appropriate now, as your oncologist said.

I looked this up out of curiosity a few days ago. There are some drugs that are used for both colon and breast cancer, but not as many as you might think, and they don't include my current treatment.

In any event, it might be too much for you to worry about another type of cancer while you are already under treatment for one already. And I read somewhere that some chemo drugs are indeed used for multiple types of cancer.

Well, I'm not sitting around wringing my hands over it. Even with the elevated risk due to my family history, the odds are against my getting colon cancer. And like I said, I've become something of a fatalist. But given my "druthers", I'd rather be screened when I can, and hope for an all-clear or at least to catch any abnormality at a pre-cancerous stage so it can be removed before it goes really haywire, than go along in blithe ignorance until I develop some symptom that can't be ignored, and discover at that point that I have a second kind of advanced cancer.