Re: Recurrences with brain mets from BRAF/MEK Drugs?

That’s an interesting question but I have to say that from my participation on the MPIP for five years I have seen a number of patients who responded to a variety of treatments recur with brain mets so I think with the newer treatments it would be hard to to tell if that is particularly true of them. I know that several patients who I got to know had some response to IL2 and then recurred to the brain. Of course fortunately many others have had long term remision from that and other treatments.

I also think that in terms of BRAF and MEF inhibitor drugs it would be necessary to get larger results from trials than are currently available for it to be analyzed with any hope of results of value.

Something that has come up a lot on the MPIP is that it’s hard to take the population of participants here and draw conclusions. That can be an issue when lower stage patients see a lot of recurrences among lower stage patients that post here. In that case it’s self selecting because most lower stage patients don’t generally have as much of a need to participate on a board like this one, therefore, many people that do stick around do so because they have recurred where those without recurrences are no longer active participants.

The new trials are a separate issue but I still think it would be hard to see if stage IV patients doing one trial are more likely to have brain mets that those in another treatment without some kind of controlled trial  looing into this issue.

That’s just my opinion of course and I am a stage III patient who hasn’t done the treatment in question.