Thanks for the breakdown! It's always comforting to see the other "statistics" (ratties, real life humans… etc) rolling in good favor of how things went (or are going) down with ones own treatment. Brain mets kept me out of trials… sooooo… yeah… I totally feel you for wanting to scream about that issue. 38 brain lesions tried to kill me over the 19 months I spent awaiting FDA approval of Pembro. Thankfully, gamma was available, and my team was willing to continue targeting (rather than switch to WBR)… through 9 rounds. When I started Pembro (15 months post completion of Ipi), we were shooting for 18-24 months of treatment. I was at the forefront of the "we just don't know yet" folks who were wondering when it was that we could actually stop. I made it just beyond 20 months before AE's kicked in. We decided to take a "pause" that has since become "I'm done with infusions", because my scans keep coming back clean! Assuming I follow the statistical pattern shown in these abstracts… things should continue in my favor… although I'm not quite the "pristine" candidates studied/reviewed. It's still good news to read! Thanks again for spelling out the number jumble! Ooooh… and for the brain lesion post too. I read an abstract from this year regarding total tumor volume versus the number of brain tumors too. I like that they're looking at that, as well as another set of researchers studying at what point tumors begin to metastisize (apparently it becomes an issue of how tightly packed the cells are). I certainly hope they're all keeping watch over one another's findings, because this messy puzzle has a lot of complex pieces!
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