Will Raul Roco win through?
The news reports today confirm that Raul Roco's prostate cancer has metastasized, which means that the cancer cells have spread to the bones. The proper medical name is bone metastasis, which most people with cancer develop at some point.

Roco was upbeat when he gave an interview with Mel Tiangco on GMA yesterday. He said that an intelligent medicine has already taken care of his cancer cells and that he can proceed with his normal lifestyle unencumbered. In today's Inquirer report, he is quoted as saying, "I will have no further treatment for now."

Has Roco won his fight against cancer ? I think there is serious reason to believe the contrary. ( One caveat: the following is nothing more but medical speculation by one who once hypochondriacally diagnosed himself with tuberculosis and psoriasis and was proven wrong to the amusement/vexation of the doctors.)

The so-called intelligent medicine that Roco got in Texas, as Dr. Jaime Galvex-Tan said, was zoledronic acid or Zolendronate, a chemotherapy drug that is used to treat solid tumors that have spread to the bones.

How does zoledronic acid work? Zoledronic acid, which was approved for cancer treatment by the American FDA in 2002, stops cancer cells from breaking down bone, thus stopping the calcium in the bone from going into the blood. The main goal of the drug is to stabilize the bone and decrease pain. It is a treatment, NOT a cure.

The condition of Roco is, I think, not as rosy as he paints it on TV. I gather that bone tumors spread quite rapidly and zoledronic acid is not 100% effective ( in fact some 30 % reduction only in one French experiment in 2002 ) in reducing skeletal-related events (SREs). Roco also must be feeling some pain even now because zoledronic acid's effect in reducing pain is not instantaneous. Somne patients even experience heightened pain after the initial dosage.

What worries me though is this transcript of a cancersourceRN interview I found:

SPEAKER_Rebecca_Hawkins: Once patients have developed bone metastasis, a variety of problems may arise. We know that these patients have a shortened survival. Other possible problems may include bone pain, pathological fractures, spinal cord compression, and hypercalcemia. Unfortunately, once patients have developed bone metastasis their survival time is limited. Patients with non-small cell lung cancer have a median survival of 3 to 6 months. A breast cancer patient's median survival is 20 months while a prostate cancer patient's mean survival is 53 months. Thankfully we are seeing some of these statistics change with newer treatments, but it is readily accepted that the patient's life is shortened after the diagnosis of bone metastasis.

Will Raul Roco survive? Only his doctors know the actual prognosis. We can only hope and pray that he does.