Repeat, High-Dose Chemo Can Cure Testicular Cancer

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"The take-home message is that continuous effort to provide treatment is effective," Abonour said.

Cures are possible, because most testicular cancers are unusually sensitive to anticancer drugs, explained Dr. George Bosl, chairman of the department of medicine at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York City.

Most of those malignancies occur in "germ" cells, where sperm is produced. "The major point of this report is that if a young man with a germ cell tumor undergoes chemotherapy and if the disease remains afterward, very high doses of chemotherapy can cure a substantial fraction of those patients," Bosl said.

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Unfortunately, the lessons learned from the treatment of testicular cancer may not extend to other malignancies, he said, "because germ cell tumors are different from other cancers, where curative chemotherapy in the first line of treatment is hard to come by." It is not yet clear why germ cells are so much more sensitive to anti-cancer drugs, Bosl said.

More information

You can learn more about testicular cancer from the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

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