This is the most optimistic article we have ever published on cancer

Prof. Ido Wolf, director of the oncology department at Ichilov, has been treating cancer patients for many years - and despite this he is very optimistic.

According to him, cancer is no longer the most serious disease - fewer people are sick with it, and more are cured.

Listen to a conversation with him in the "Expert Clinic" studio

Iris Cole

04/02/2022

Friday, 04 February 2022, 07:58

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Diagnosis of cancer was until a few years ago a death sentence, but the field of medicine is developing, and for many types of cancer there are already effective treatments, and even tools that help keep the disease at bay.

On the occasion of Cancer Day, which is marked today (Friday), we invited Prof. Ido Wolf, director of the oncology department at Ichilov Hospital, to ask what we must know about cancer today - and what the future holds for us.

"Oncology is considered a very tough field, many are not even able to say the words oncology or cancer, the paper always says 'serious illnesses' or 'complex conditions'," said Prof. Wolf, "Not even the hardest, there are harder things. I'm not sure terrible dementia is easier than cancer."

He said the most important thing to know about cancer is "that in recent years there has been a big change in the field of cancer treatment. If it was once a death sentence, if we look at Israel's statistics, the chances of getting cancer go down, and the chances of recovering go up. So the news is good." .

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It is important to know that the population is aging, and this too is affecting the incidence of cancer.

"Cancer is a disease of old age, and the older the population, the more cases of cancer we see ... precisely because of the prolongation of life expectancy, the more cases of cancer appear," Dr. Wolf explained, but emphasized that despite this, the statistics in Israel say: "Great."

Much of this improvement in cancer morbidity is due to preventative medicine. Many Israelis are more aware and regularly perform cancer screening tests such as mammography or colonoscopy, thus "detecting the cancer earlier and treating it better."

The path to healing is sometimes not simple, but it is worth it

Prof. Wolf also had an encouraging answer to the question of the price paid by cancer patients during complex treatments such as chemotherapy.

"First of all, if we find out early we will need fewer treatments," he explained, "and if we need treatments - here too there are already big changes than there used to be. True, there is still chemotherapy, especially in breast cancer, where it causes hair loss and more side effects, but In other cancers we have been able to give much less harsh combinations, and in some cases we move from chemotherapy to all kinds of biological and training treatments that are much easier for patients, so we definitely have successes. "

Fighting for a few months, only to reach 120 later.

Chemotherapy (Photo: ShutterStock)

Even in the most severe cases, Prof. Wolf emphasizes, it is usually a very tough war of a few months, "but we do this war to get to 120 later. The advantage of the treatments today is that the vast majority of patients - we can cure them, and 120 It's a realistic prognosis, to reach recovery from cancer.So true, there will be some difficult months on the way, even very difficult, but the optimistic side is that if I have a 35 or 40 year old patient who has breast cancer, I used to know she would die from this cancer, today I know "After a few difficult months, she will be able to live and be with her family and children, and even her grandchildren," he said.

In a few years we will be able to detect cancer with a simple blood test

One of the problems with cancer, especially the metastatic and widespread one, is that it is sometimes difficult to find or detect it, but there has also been significant progress in this area in recent years.

"Today there are already blood tests developing in this direction, which can detect really tiny elements of the blood tumor, super-sensitive tests, which can detect even if there is minimal disease," said Prof. Wolf. "We will use these tests routinely for years, and we will know who has or does not have the little things and adapt better treatment. And more than that, I assume that in 3-5 years we will test healthy people, and already in a blood test we can detect the cancer."

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Today we are still not there, there are only regular screening tests that can be done to detect cancer early, "but in a few years, and it's not much, each of us will come to the doctor and have a blood test and look for the cancer early," Prof. Wolf clarified.

He added that in England a study has just begun on exactly this test, planning to test several hundred thousand people, "so a study already underway today will yield results in two, three, four years, and it is likely that in not many years each of us will see a doctor once every few years "Do a blood test for me and tell me if I have cancer."

He added that "the test already exists, it is in hand, I think in 10 years our conversation will be completely different".

To watch the full episode:

Iris Cole interviews Prof. Ido Wolf of Ichilov on developments in the field of cancer (Walla system!)

Most cancers have no clear cause

When there is cancer, most people look for a cause, but it can not always be found.

"When someone has cancer he tries to find out what the cause is, it's natural, and a lot of times the cause of cancer is hung on all sorts of events that have happened to us, of all kinds and species."

However, according to Prof. Wolf, about 5 percent of cancers are the result of genetics and heredity, 30-35 percent are mutations caused to us by the environment, such as smoking and sun exposure, and about 60 percent are other factors that have no clear cause.

"When something happens randomly, the other name is bad luck, and we actually get a big group of people saying 'but I behaved nicely, why did it happen?'

And the real answer is that many of the processes are biological processes that behave according to a mathematical model, and do not exactly care what we did or did not do, "Prof. Wolf clarified," it needs to be understood. "

This understanding, of course, should not hurt optimism, for as Prof. Wolf clarified the chance of getting cancer decreases, and the chance of recovering - increases, but it is important to be able to with this diagnosis, which despite the optimism - is still frightening.

• health

Tags

• cancer

• Ichilov

• Pancreatic cancer

• Mammography

• Colonoscopy

• Tumors