PROGRESS AGAINST CANCER

[Music] [Music] the gospel can do this for me it can make me to know that that there is a living God you were sent by a local physician with a history of being tired and not eating good and our zone where a test was done at that time which gave the diagnosis of acute leukemia oh it scared me there I thought the world had come to me and I told her I felt like it would be better that if Darren went to a Cancer Research Center for treatment so everything is all right huh with you huh you feel all right today okay you want to be deep for me he came here immediately before any treatment and we confirmed the diagnosis and they made some few tests self and they decided they definitely he had leukemia now once st. Jesus starts the initial treatment in arts him into remission or gets her leukemia under control then they send them back to the referring physician like myself and we see these patients on once a week basis to give them their IV medication Darren is doing exceptionally well he's been in a remission from his leukemia or has had no evidence of leukemia now for nearly three years oh don't fuss you've had this done to your plow some times here lately I believe he's getting somewhat tired of getting poked with needles so it's been for three years now right well we decided to that it is the right time to stop the chemotherapy so from now on no more drugs no more shots what about that no more shots in 1946 when the first chemo therapeutic agent was discovered that was effective in leukemia children could be expected to live approximately two or three months with the disease in the more recent study it looks as if we're going to have be 50 percent five-year leukemia free remission rate but of course we all hope that the cause of the disease will be defined and that we will be able to prevent it because that's the best treatment of all it's a very beautiful time to be in this field because we can see a big light at the end of the tunnel finally [Music] tonight we're going to talk about hope and we're going to talk about the progress we've already made against cancer and about the progress we can hope for in the very near future there is always hope I can quite honestly have a very much more optimistic attitude than ever before very optimistic certainly is hopeful the doctor fighting cancer today has three principal weapons surgery radiotherapy and treatment by drugs or chemotherapy these three fields of surgery radiotherapy and chemotherapy should be available to every patient on the day that there is a suspicion that cancer is present before the diagnosis is actually made and with all these experts representing these several kinds of treatment areas there should be a decision made by all of them as to what is best for each particular patient and what the second line of treatment should be if the first fails and what the third should be in other words this is the era of an interdisciplinary approach this is no longer a field for the treatment of one patient by one doctor by any one method of treatment the first doctors used only single drugs one at a time to treat cancer this was because there were very few drugs that were active but as the national program has produced more and more drugs that are highly active against cancer it has been possible to combine at first two and now in some of our most successful instances the use of a combination of four drugs given over a relatively long periods of time 15 years ago virtually no cancers were controllable by drugs at the present time the list is about 12 to 15 we started mr. Gray's treatment in the cember and you had six courses of chemotherapy nurse there were three or four drugs I think it was three drops every three weeks Regis having completed the drug therapy we're now starting on the radiation therapy to the residual disease Parkins disease is particularly sensitive to radiation it used to be considered a fatal disease but the improvement in the control and in the cure Hodgkin's disease has been really dramatic it has improved greatly during the past five years because we have better drugs and better combinations of drugs and we often combine the drug therapy and radiation therapy this patient has an 80 to 90 percent chance of being cured I'm Marlo Thomas and I'm at st. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis Tennessee and this is Marty Marty is 10 years old and he lives in Memphis well his symptoms were being very tired he bruised very easily and we noticed a difference in his walking pattern he was four years old he told us that he thought it was leukemia well I think it was seven years when we started coming and I'm coming every three months now it's something you always think happens to someone else rather than you and I guess it was probably the saddest day in our lives the first part of the treatment one drug prednisone was given early and increasing was given weekly in the vein it was in one of these bottles that they stuck in your and a vein in your arm and put this it was a I'm not really sure what deny that was the first treatment was the use of two drugs prednisone invented Kristin which was to get him into remission and I as I recall it took 19 now at 2 or 3 months interval he had this spinal tap and bone marrow aspiration well every six months they give this one certain test to detect any leukemic activity in anybody it feels kinda like we lost dangers after two years since he maintained his initial remission we decided to stop his treatment now just take a deep breath yeah he says plainly is not palpable very good don't move your head now just stay still the bone marrow is normal the spinal fluid is clear and the blood count is normal you don't take any medicine you just go and do whatever you want if you want to go camping you go ahead and do it if you'd like to swim to do it you can do whatever you want because your condition is perfect there were seven boys taken off at the same time that Marty was taken off and this was the first that had been removed from drugs I've been off medicine for five years now dr. Donald tinkle is the medical director of st. Jude doctor Pinkle would you tell us about the first time you took a look in your patient off treatment well we had several children who had been in complete remission free of all evidence of leukemia for three or four years and it was a new experience for us we knew that if we stopped treatment and they weren't cured that the leukemia would relapse and they would die of their leukemia so I saw one young child and spoke to the mother and explained to her that I was not certain that her child was cured of leukemia and that it might only be suppressed but that I felt that we had to remove these drugs from the child in order to ascertain whether he was cured or not the mother cried and I went off afterwards alone and I cried a little myself but we stopped the drugs we stopped the treatment and that child now is completely free of all keenya and the healthy child and there are many others like him well I plan on a baseball team and I like to fish only thing I've come close to catching they've been turtle was a Marty one of the first patients head yes he was one of the first five that we took off treatment and has he had any recurrence no well last our last bug and we got bait 91 it was our first gun because our other got rained out we didn't do use it on our heat he's not unusual he is one type of patient we're going to be seen more and more often Marty had been in fine house enjoying normal growth normal development just as normal as any boy [Music] well I feel real today when I was a medical student more than 45 years ago we were saving only one out of six or one out of five patients with malignant cancers today we are saving one-third of all patients with all kinds of malignant cancer and this number could be very much greater the whole thing is early detection early detection and early treatment I'm an investor not in the office of dr. Jane riot in New York City dr. right what is the purpose of a practice the purpose of taking a Pap test is to detect cancer of the mouth of the uterus at its earliest stage if one has a Pap test and cancer detected fog is then the treatment vor then treated either by surgery or by radiotherapy if the disease is caught at its very earliest stage yes it can be cured in a hundred percent of the population isn't that immoral wow I didn't know it was a hundred percent in those areas of the country where women have the Pap test performed routinely once or twice per year the mortality rate from carcinoma the cervix has been reduced by 50% now the incidence of cancer the cervix is the same it is the third leading cancer in women but the mortality rate has been reduced because it is being detected at earliest stages where we will take where women will take their Pap test done as just nothing to do how about tests right I'm Dionne Warwick and I'm in dr. max Cutler's office dr. Cutler which cancer is the cause of most of the deaths and women today cancer the breast is there tests like the Pap test that can be taken to catch it early mammography which is examination of the breast with x-rays x-ray pictures of the breast is comparable to the pap smear and that it aims to detect cancers that are too small to be felt on the clinical examination takes about 30 minutes is there something I can do you know like to see if they are to prevent it or should I go to a doctor what is the usual procedure some women find it acceptable to examine their own breasts and only self-examination to your advantage to know things ahead of time is a very big emotional problem and you rather not know the bad news and just pretend it's all good you know eight out of ten operations that a surgeon does on a brush that I do on the breast are benign lesions not cancer so that the odds are in favor of getting good news and of course if the cancer is early and has not yet reached the glands under the arm there's an 80% chance of cure many detection is crucially important until such time as we can prevent the disease it's the only thing in identifying factors which cause cancer we ought to be able to prevent it cancer is not our inherent birthright simply because we're people this comes from many studies which show that up to 95% of our cancers are extrinsic that is they're not due to our inheritance or to our genetics they're due to something that happened something that were exposed to one out of every four or five men that work in a plant like this will die with cancer it's true that that won't happen until they're in their 50s their sixties or their seventies perhaps but we have to certainly take into consideration the possibility that there are things here in their work life that increase their risk of the disease no more all the way up it has being performed here is a test which will show a loss of pulmonary ventilatory capability as a result of the long-term contamination of the lung with the site's particles as for example silicon particles which are a known specific cause a one particular kind of lung cancer now if the industrial environment is putting in chemical agents which cause cancer then if we can identify these and eliminate them we can produce a very substantial reduction in the tumor incidence in this country in general in the Northeast and the Great Lakes sections death rates are high for cancer and they're low else worth and if we can find clues in the environment in these sections of the country then we can find clues to controlling the environment toward eliminating those things that are cancer-causing in the rest of the United States this is a map that shows instead of where death rates are high where they're rising rapidly and where they're rising slowly they're rising slowly in this area up here and rapidly down here so that the rates are coming together over time one most interesting general ideas from these trends over time is that if those tumors that are related to smoking a very very simple habit were eliminated that that the habit were eliminated that for all race sex groups males females whites non-whites cancer would be actually dropping and that the reason we're looking at an epidemic size problem to the major extent is related to one habits of smoking how'd you find out you have cancer well my wife had talked me into getting yearly checkups at Scripps Clinic and I went down there for my usual checkup and they found it in time if I hadn't been doing that you're in and year out they probably wouldn't have found it in time how'd you feel when they told you you had it well it was just like somebody hit you in the belly with a iron pipe you don't believe it at first it's a kind of a shock and then you settle down to find out what your chances are you ever have a feeling of hopelessness in the beginning no I didn't why my hardest decision was how to tell my family and then whether or not to allow it to become public and I think I chose the right way why did you allow it to become public well I figured that if one person could get any value out of the fact that I had been saved by having a check-up in time would it be worthwhile are you cured now I guess I am I've been doing a full day's work for a full day's pay were you a heavy smoker yeah are you now no sir what do you think your chances would have been if you'd had the same cancer say 15 or 20 years ago well I just wouldn't be out here riding around these hills why not I'd be dead haunted a few years makes a difference because the research that they have done in the last few years has given many people a chance to live but with all the successes the job is far from being done the work goes on in hospitals and laboratories all over the country cancer is a very broad category of disease just like infection is a category of disease no one I think would lump a boil or a pimple with a pneumonia and yet they are both infections the treatment of one is far more difficult and dangerous than that of the other and similarly when we succeed in making an advance for a particular cancer this is not a sweeping advance that applies to all cancers it means we have to start all over again the next day to begin work on the next type of cancer these are human cancer cells alive dividing multiply normal cells grow they do their work they die then are replaced by portal II cell division cancer cells on the other hand divide very rapidly and without order they crowd out the normal cells and keep them from doing their job and the cancer cells travel metastasize is the medical term they spread through the body finally overwhelming a vital organ causing death starts with a single cell which somehow becomes cancerous and divided then the two cells divide and so on ultim of the time the cancer is detected so many divisions have taken place that it's too late for help it is not the treatments that we know to be effective that offers the hope for me it is the treatments that I know are going to be developed while the person I'm treating has his illness that it has to be improved you see as long as we stay on it the white blood cells are the important cells in protecting an individual against infection particularly in patients with cancer and patients who are getting chemical treatment for their cancer the white blood count tends to be depressed as a side effect if we can replace the white blood cells by transfusion we can help them get more therapy for their cancer and in addition we can prevent these unpleasant infections the technology for this instrument has a long way to go in development this is in my eyes the Model T new methods of treatment for example what if cancer were caused by a virus if a virus can be isolated that can sometimes be controlled by a vaccine since about 1900 we've come to recognize about a hundred and ten different viruses which are capable of causing cancer in virtually every major group of laboratory and domestic animals now based on this information we've been able to isolate four different types of viruses directly from human cancers type C particles the type being examined in the scope at the present time are those which are associated predominantly with leukemias lymphomas and sarcomas of children our difficult task now is to acquire the kind of information which is necessary to try to relate a particular virus isolated from human cancer to the causation of that cancer this is the national cancer institute's virus isolation facility in it's approximately 100 investigators are conducting studies designed to determine which viruses are capable of causing cancer in men we're shooting for obviously is to try to determine whether vaccines similar to that which prevents polio can be used there are many problems here one of the most important for instance is that it really took only about one summer to determine whether we had the right vaccine for the Prevention of polio with cancer it would take at least five years and in many cases more to find out whether the child vaccinated against let's say leukemia was in fact protected against leukemia there are many questions still to be answered one of the most interesting is simply this why doesn't everybody get cancer why doesn't everybody develop the cancer well this is not the unusual thing because in our animals as in man only about 20% of of individuals develop cancer in their lifetime this particular Mouse is a resistant Mouse on the other hand this mouse is very susceptible to cancer and is one of the let us say 20% device that was developed cancer and you can see that when it was injected with a chemical which produces cancer very rapidly it has developed cancer now in this case the mouse was also injected you see it was the same chemical and it has not developed cancer nature is doing an excellent job not good enough by any means of protecting us against cancer during large parts of our early life and actually is protecting as many as four out of five people who do not die of cancer so our whole purpose is to find out if we can and we have a pretty good idea what we want to do and what to look for to find out what it is that nature is doing we want to help her patients with cancer do respond immunologically to their disease in other words the body recognizes its own cancer cells as foreign and attempts to reject them what we want to do of course is to find ways to understand how the body defends itself against cancer and then to use this information to control the disease there are a number of promising leads one that intrigues us has to do with substances that have the capacity to induce a general heightening of the immune reaction we've known for some time that mice injected with products isolated from bacteria or from East are far more resistant than normal animals to the growth and development of cancer but we now need to find out is how to achieve the same thing in men it's the type of work in which doctors must be attuned of being patient and to working for many many years to see their results but the fact is the results are emerging and curates today are so far ahead of the of ten or fifteen or twenty years ago that there's literally no comparison it was an active was gun that told me what is that it actually was cancer I was scared my heart Bank discovered it in 1964 was in 1962 been over ten years well about nine years ago feel fine great well I feel good if I get pension I'll I think it'll be from some other source not the same never found anything since no recurrence whatsoever I had a sister-in-law who died of cancer at an uncle that passed away me the same thing I think more people died of cancer than they do now I don't feel 20 years or 15 years before my surgery there would have been nearly the chance that I had might not have come out why I was fortunate for me treatments have been improved they have more keywords more discoveries research always working it's shocking when you hear about it but there's always hope no I don't feel it's hopeless no not know lot of people get cured a lot of people you know there was a time not so long ago when the diagnosis of cancer was literally a death sentence but that's no longer true as you've seen tonight cancer is not a hopeless disease we are making progress against cancer but for many who are sick could who be sick in the days to come the progress we're making is not enough we must do more we must learn more we must continue and increase our efforts and God willing we shall thank you and good night good night [Music] you this year more than 650,000 new cases of cancer will be diagnosed in the United States this disease strikes everywhere strikes all ages strikes in many forms we are committed to fight against cancer we've committed our resources human and financial to put an end to camp and that commitment may possibly be the most difficult our nation has ever made and the most important [Music] for information about cancer and about doctors and hospitals near you participating in National Cancer Institute programs right cancer National Cancer Institute Bethesda Maryland 200 one for