Guest guest Posted September 22, 2010 Report Share Posted September 22, 2010 LLS has a discussion group, and I copied some of the chatter. I thought it was a good explanation of what remission is and is not. For people who have CML, it might be a better way to explain it to family and friends who inquire about how we are managing CML. You might find some more useful information there as well. 'The term used by the leading CML specialists is " response " , not " remission " , since remission implies a cure or progress toward a cure. Note that the " R " in CHR, CCR, MMR, and CHR is " response " , not remission. This is more than just a technical difference, since other types of curable cancer have remission, but we have response to drug therapy. The exception is a bone marrow transplant where remission (cure) is the goal. The goal of our drug therapy is to gain maximum response to the drug therapy which 1) halts disease progression, and 2) puts the disease into a continuous state of very low level chronic stage CML. So the answer to your question is that we have various levels of response to treatment, not remission. But if family and friends don't understand that, then using the term " remission " is certainly understandable. But then " remission " would be hard to categorize, since one would need to assign an arbitrary point where " remission " occurs. I suppose a casual definition to use with family is that CML has levels of " response/remission " defined by declining levels of leukemia in the blood, with the best outcome being an undetectable level of leukemia in the blood (until a cure is found). " The following is an except from my CML Blog: http://community.lls.org/blogs/CML http://community.lls.org/thread/2983 FYI, Lottie Duthu Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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