The Princess of Wales, Kate Middleton, announced on Tuesday January 14 that she was in remission from her cancer. In March 2024, she announced that she was undergoing preventive chemotherapy after the detection of cancer in the abdomen. Neither the nature nor the stage of the cancer had been communicated.
This is after a visit to Royal Marsden Hospital from London, specializing in oncology, that Kate Middleton announced, on social networks, to be in remission.
What does the term remission mean?
Remission corresponds to the disappearance of the signs and symptoms of the disease. There are no longer any tumors visible during examinations or detectable cancer cells.
When no more signs of the disease are detectable, we speak of complete remission; a term preferred by caregivers to that of healing.
“It is always very complicated as a doctor to commit to healing a patient, Professor Steven Le Gouill, hematologist, director of the Institut Curie hospital complex, explained to us in 2023. Telling a patient that he is cured is telling him that he will never relapse.”
However, observing that no more signs of the disease are detectable means that there are no longer any visible signs with the means available to caregivers.
But this does not mean that there are no residual cells left in the body. This may be undetectable with the imaging or sample analysis devices available at the time T but could reactivate the cancer months or years later.
-Follow-up that can last a lifetime
The term cure is more often used by statisticians who manipulate “the 5-year survival rate”.
They estimate that a patient has a high chance of being cured when, 5 years after diagnosis, he finds the same life expectancy as the entire population of the same age, same sex and not having had cancer, notes the National Cancer Institute.
A rate to be handled with caution since, as oncologist Alain Toledano explained to us, “certain cancers have a peak of relapse at 2 – 3 years, others at 6-7 years. So, we cannot tell a patient 5 years after cancer that he is cured.”
In remission, after treatments, a phase of active surveillance and regular follow-up begins in order to detect as early as possible a possible recurrence of the disease (the reappearance of cancer cells) and the occurrence of a new cancer.
The follow-up time depends on the cancer but lasts, according to the Inca, at least 5 years or even for life.
