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Doctors Lounge - Oncology Answers
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| hair123
- Sun Dec 09, 2007 1:46 pm |
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Im 27 years old and just been diagnosed with tc.
I noticed that on 19/11/07 my left testicle had swollen up and was hard.
Went and saw my GP on 23/11/07 and had my ultrasound on 5/12/07.
Then informed i had a tuma in my left testicle about 2.5cm big (don't know if this is large or not.)
On the same day i saw the urologist and the Mcmillan nurse.
My surgey is booked for 17/12/2007 - is that the usual waiting time?
My chest x-ray was clear and my blood levels were
HCG - 31
AFP - 19
Again don't know to much what that means appart from it is a Nonseminoma cancer.
Can anything be told from the above so far?
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| Dr. Tamer Fouad
- Sat Dec 15, 2007 11:01 pm |
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 Hello hair123,
I am sorry to hear about your diagnosis. Testicular cancer is curable in the majority of cases. By curable I mean long term cure as opposed to simply going into remission.
Many clinical parameters are used to determine the overall prognosis of the condition. This way a doctor can answer a patient when he asks questions like - will the tumor return? What are the chances of cure? What are the symptoms that I should expect and will my condition get worse? All of that is known as prognosis.
HCG and AFP are two of the many parameters that are used to answer these questions.
So this is how your doctor would think about it:
If you have nonseminomatous cancer the following characteristics are considered good:
1. Is located in the testis or in an area known as the retroperitoneal space and
2. Your cancer hasn't spread to other organs (determined by CT scans etc). If they spread to the lungs its ok - any other organ its not ok.
3. If your tumor markers are good
- α-fetoprotein (AFP) less than 1,000 ng/mL
- Human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) less than 5,000 IU/mL (1,000 ng/mL)
- Lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) less than 1.5 × the upper limit of normal
90% of patients with these characteristics were found to be alive and doing well 5 years after diagnosis when research was done to find out what happened to them. Overall up to 95% were still alive at 5 years (albeit a small proportion of about 5% may have had the disease at that time and were receiving treatment.
So, this isn't really a cancer in the traditional sense. I hope that answers your question and let me know if you need anything else!
Best regards,
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