What does NED mean?

[guest]

What is NED? What is meant by there being no cure for "this type of cancer"? Isn't remission a cure?

[sean]

No Evidence of Disease. Look at the post with that title for some more info. Some people are actually "cured" by surgery, chemo, or other treatment. There is just no test sensitive enough to tell who is cured and who is not, so anyone who has had cancer lives with uncertainty.

Here's some common terms that float around.

NED - No Evidence of Disease. Where anyone with cancer wants to be.

DFS - Disease Free Survival. Statistic that is usually tracked at 5 years and point at which one has a good probability of being cured.

Recurrence - generally cancer was already there and now big enough to detect. Could also be a second instance of the same kind of primary cancer.

Remission - No evidence of disease. Implies for me that there were metastases that were treated or removed surgically. I've also heard it used for anyone who had a primary tumor removed, so don't know if this is a real distinction.

Cured - you have been NED for long enough to assume that there is no cancer. You can never really be certain because cancer can lie dormant or slow growing for a very long time. Complete removal of a primary tumor does not guarantee you are cured. You only know that you are more likely to have been cured with the passage of time.

Cancer - General term for hundreds of separate diseases that all suck, and some more than others. For me, its the uncertainty that gnaws at me the most - I have no fear of treatments no matter how nasty. Make sure you and anyone you care about does all the recommended cancer screenings because the sooner a cancer is caught the less likely there will be a recurrence and the more likely that they are cured - even though they won't ever know for certain. Good news is that there are lots of treatment options out there and they get better all the time so "not curable" does not mean the same thing as terminal.