Reply to Tatiana Schlossberg (Caroline Kennedy's daughter) her terminal cancer at 34

Forum Index » Entertainment and Pop Culture

Reply to "Tatiana Schlossberg (Caroline Kennedy's daughter) her terminal cancer at 34 "

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What would have happened had she just said no to treatment? How long would she have lasted? The treatment sounded brutal. [/quote]
I wonder that too. Did the treatment make everything worse? What would have happened if she didn't do anything?

Another (awful) what if thought - did being pregnant with her daughter trigger the cancer? Pregnancy hormones can wreck havoc on your body. I assume nothing came up in blood works she had taken before being pregnant. Major coincidence to develop cancer while pregnant or did the hormones trigger this bad case of cancer?[/quote]

No, pregnancy doesn’t trigger AML and it’s relatively rare to develop AML in your thirties (though I believe the rates are rising, which is scary). It’s possible that she wrote off her cancer symptoms (if she had any… stuff like fatigue…) as pregnancy symptoms. Which is why it’s great they found it when she gave birth, so they could start treatment right away.

Pregnancy hormones don’t appear to influence AML like they do with breast cancer, I believe. (Though there’s still a lot they don’t know about hormonal links with cancer)[/quote]
AML by itself doesn’t have such a dire prognosis when diagnosed under 40. Tatiana Schlossberg could have lived for years with the best treatments she would have undoubtedly had access to. She was extremely unlucky to have the inversion 3 mutation which is a very rare subset and resistant to treatment.[/quote]

While all “AML” results in the uncontrolled overgrowth of immature myeloid cells that take over the bone marrow, it’s not quite accurate that patients under the age of 40 have a non-dire prognosis. That is because AML is a very heterogeneous disease, and is defined by numerous different cytogenetic alterations (chunks of chromosomes that are rearranged or deleted) and single gene mutations, all of which influence prognosis.

Some AML patients do well at any age - for instance patients with acute promyelocytic leukemia (with a translocation between chromosomes 15 and 17) do very very well, the treatment is relatively gentle, and they rarely need a transplant. But some forms of AML are an absolute disaster at any age.

She had such bad luck.

Knowing what I know, if I had AML with inv(3) I would agree to a few cycles of chemo to buy me time to get my affairs in order and say goodbye to people while I stockpiled opiates/figured out a way to kill myself on my own terms.

Ms. Schlossberg, however, did something very generous - she reportedly participated in a clinical trial for some sort of CAR T-cells, which adds to our medical knowledge. Someday we may find a cure for AML with inv(3) (assuming our govt doesn’t continue to dismantle our country’s research enterprise), and it will be because of the patients who agreed to participate in clinical trials. This is a generous choice, and she undoubtedly did some good for the unfortunate patients who come after her.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics