also medical, admittedly not oncology. I’m aware there’s a whole lot of things that do go into those decisions but age is absolutely one of them. We don’t know a thing about his health right now outside of he has cancer in an unspecified area. We don’t know his staging, we don’t know his general health, his fitness levels, his immune system, none of it.
When I was on my oncology placement there was a case of a 76 year old woman with breast cancer and the oncologist absolutely didn’t do chemo on her, mainly because of her age and the staging. She got radiation and made a full recovery. Literature also points to patients over 65 having a higher risk of having harsher reactions. Is the decision for treatement options made on a case by case basis? Absolutely but age is factored.
other treatment options aren’t lesser. He has the best drs in the country working on him, they’ll do what’s best.
I'm a doctor.
Age really isn't a factor on it's own. It's performance status (because chemo usually takes a person down 1 level on that, so if we're giving it to someone bedbound they're likely to hit PS5 - dead!), whether chemotherapy is actually needed based on the tumours characteristics, and whether it'd do any good. Often we treat ER+/PR+ breast cancers with hormonal therapy, resection and radiotherapy only - this really is standard practice and the lack of chemotherapy isn't due to age. Triple negatives always, always get chemotherapy if we're actually planning to treat it. It depends on the tumour itself, not the patient's age.
Of course older, frailer patients are more likely to get side effects from chemo. But that doesn't mean we don't offer it at all. It means it's stopped if the effect is bad enough. We also don't only give chemo for curative intent, plenty of it is palliative (and gentler).
Oncologists will usually give anybody who'd benefit in even the slightest way a good go of chemo to be honest, even if it's seemingly futile. They've got a reputation amongst other doctors for this. How many oncologists do you need to be pallbearers at a funeral? Five. Four to carry the casket, one to hang the chemo...
I wouldn't want anybody to be put off from going getting something checked because they think they're too old to be treated. I had a case of this a few years ago, where a lady in her 80s didn't think she should or could get a breast lump checked because 'she's too old to get anything' (we operate on ladies even into their 90s, btw). So by the time anybody found out, she had a fungating breast mass and brain mets. Absolutely grim.
