What does it mean if my lung cancer remains stable during treatment?

What does it mean if my lung cancer remains stable during treatment?

Jay M. Lee (Surgical Director, Thoracic Oncology Program, UCLA) gives expert video advice on: Can I be cured of lung cancer?; What are the treatment options for lung cancer?; How will my doctor decide which treatment is best for my lung cancer? and more...

Stability of the lung cancer during treatment is difficult to interpret. It may mean that 1) the treatment is working and your tumor is not growing, or 2) that it hasn't worked and there's still a underlying tumor. Often what we find, when we take patients after receiving induction chemotherapy, is that there is a subset of patients where you see a persistent lung mass, radiographically, but at the time of surgery, when the tumor is taken out, that there is complete sterility or absence of lung cancer cells there. Stability of a lung tumor can be interpreted radiographically as being cancer still being present, or it may be all sterile and with a good treatment response. So it is, overall, difficult to interpret that situation.