 tentang  Pronunciation inter  197 Başkanthಮ ಮ ಟ addಟಾರಿ ಮಾes ಮೋಮಮ ಕೋ� Appro бок  мен 構  ratings as we do cancer is our focus and that's the discussion so what is it what is this month this is july july is sarcoma awareness month so our focus is going to be on sarcoma however let me give you the briefings of what's going on in july what is sarcoma sarcoma are common cancers that can affect any part of your body a key symptom of sarcoma is a lump that gets bigger quickly and most people get diagnosed when the sarcoma is about the size of a large tin of big beans that's how i have to describe it and welcome to today's show and i'm going to tell you this month is world head and neck cancer which is on the 27th of july so all of you that planning events don't forget we need to be talking about world head and neck cancer on the 27th so let's start our conversation together we fight together we win a common cancer foundation we welcome you so this program once again so doc let me introduce you dr abib is the head of oncology at the nsie glute cancer center in legos his area of research interests are prostrate cancer breast cancer colorectal cancers head and neck cancers and rare cancers like sarcoma he is a fellow of the west african college of surgeons radiology and a member of the association of radiation and clinical oncologists in nigeria known as akon very interesting and the american society of clinical oncologists at school and the quality assurance team for radiation oncology in nigeria wow doc all these your organizations me and them we're having a conversations as we keep going welcome and thank you for joining us today so let's go we're going to be talking about sarcoma and it's the type of cancer most people don't know about it we hear about it even i have just done a bit of homework on it and it's been quite interesting that i realized now i don't even know what they're talking about so let me ask you you are the specialist what is sarcoma and is sarcoma a serious cancer yes sarcoma is a serious cancer because sarcoma is more difficult to treat than most other common cancers sarcoma is cancer of the connective tissues what is cancer cancer are abnormal cells that continue to multiply they have the tendency to invade the surrounding normal structures and they also have the tendency to spread to this path what is connective tissues we already know what organs are we have the eye the the lungs the ovary the breast then the connected tissue is what holds this together it holds it together and supports it mainly muscles bones blood you know these structures are structures that connect other organs and that hold them in place sarcoma is the cancer of this connective tissue it is not a very common you know malignancy but it is we see a lot of sarcoma because of the population and sarcoma have different type like i said can be subdivided into bone bony sarcomas and soft tissue sarcomas then we have in the bone sarcoma we have many other variants like aiming sarcoma like john said two more like kundro sarcoma and many other types then the soft tissue sarcoma we also have varied like the smooth muzzle sarcoma which we call lio mouse sarcoma we have the straighted muzzle sarcoma we have blood sarcomas you know common part of the soft tissue sarcoma sarcomas are varied what makes sarcoma very important is that because it's the connective tissue the cancer they have usually good blood supply and this blood supply is what makes it very easy for it to spread from one part of the body which we call the primary side to this side so sarcoma can also be of different grades it could be the aggressive one it could be the indolent one the sarcomas that occur in areas that are not highly vascularized like the sarcomas of of the fatty tissue lapar sarcoma or kundro sarcoma which is not very vascularized they are a bit more indolent than those of the muzzle than those of the main bone that's like the osteosarcoma and the straighted muzzle sarcomas wow sarcoma can also affect anybody any age any race any profession sarcoma can affect so it's very important we all know what sarcoma is and usually it will present with pain if it is affecting the bone structure pain and swelling but if it is affecting the soft tissue most of the time it comes as a lump but it's usually a painless lump by the times it becomes painful in the soft tissue it is already getting advanced are they rare though they are rare but not very rare okay you would have met somebody that amputation of the bone because of sarcoma they are rare because they are not as common as breast cancer they are not as common as prostate cancer uberian cancer and all that but it's it's not something that we don't come across okay so now based on that from that understanding of sarcoma because i'm finding sarcomas very hard to understand so let me let me continue to go with this so what is the cost of sarcoma okay most of the time is sporadic which i mean is that you cannot trace the cost of course you have a small percentage of sarcoma that we can trace to genetic mutation to certain syndromes for example there's something called neurofibromatosis patients that have neurofibromatosis you see them have multiple nodules which continue to get some of them continue to get bigger and may have what we call malignant transformation and this is one of the costs of and many also people have what we call leave from any syndrome it's a genetic mutation that has to do with what we call two months suppression gene we all have cancer produced in our in our system but we have you know agents that are able to suppress it that that's two months suppression gene our gene can produce agents that can suppress it but when there's defective in this protection then those two more cells they have leeway to flourish and then it manifests as cancer so patient will leave from any syndrome also who have sarcoma then there are some people who have polyps in their deity in their colon you know such people may have genetic condition called familiar adenomatosis polypsis coli those polyps who also degenerate into sarcoma however majority of people that have sarcomas you cannot say this is the cost it's just a explorative transformation of the gene wow okay so basically you can't know the cost okay so you see that's a very good starting point because cancer on its own is a very complex disease that a lot of us especially those of us that sit on it if you will notice a lot of people from low middle income countries across the world of the opinion maybe they did something wrong and some people think it's somebody else's portion and so we don't actually take treatment on time and we always that's why we in low middle income countries will resort to going to religious centers where you come from when you are saying we don't actually yeah we can't narrow it down so let me ask you a question cool so can it be cured and if we can what are the processes what are the expectations i'm not talking about treatment options i'm talking about just the cure yes it can be cured but it can only be cured if it is detected and managed and treated early once it has spread from the primary side to other part of the body it becomes a case that cannot be cured in this case we now have to give palliative treatments that we have to keep in you have to try and suppress the rate of growth of the disease but it can be cured if cut early okay thank you okay vias let let us take a break here now and then we'll be coming back we'll be continuing our conversation with Dr Habib on this discussion on sarcoma and let's see how much we can get but one of the key things i've taken away is that it can be cured if diagnosed early and we also know that there's no particular cure for certain circles for sarcoma so two things we have picked up to the no particular cause and it can't be cured if diagnosed early let me put the if so let's take a short break now we'll be back shortly thank you stay with us this is common cancer foundation welcome back thank you all for staying with us this is common cancer foundation in partnership with um first tv africa as we discussed sarcoma a type of cancer okay doc thank you for how far and like i said we got two things that i've actually picked up on on what is i'm trying to pick up things that are misconceptions a lot of the time we have a lot of misconceptions but let me go to what are the treatment options because you know cancer is this is the c word and i'm very mindful i live with the disease so i and i know that my treatment option is different from others and the way you described it is so can you talk us through the treatment options for sarcoma if there's any specific one yes we have five major options for treatments for sarcoma we must recognize that sarcomas is they are very it's a spectrum of disease so we cannot have the same form of treatment for all it depends on investigation what we see at the time we detected it what are the what there is something called immunosu to chemistry which tells us the character of the that particular type of sarcoma however the major treatments are surgery radiotherapy chemotherapy hormone therapy is usually not applicable to sarcoma but targeted therapy is also applicable so i will go through i'll quickly run through surgery usually is done to remove the tumor that's when it is cut very early and it's respectable but it can also be used to take sample to test for the disease what we call biopsy and at times if the tumor is so large that it's weighing down the patients you can just do surgery even if it is advanced but in such case the surgery you are doing is not creative it's just a palliative surgery then radiotherapy is the use of ionizing radiation to treat cancer examples of ionizing radiations are x-rays gamma rays proton beam and there are some other you know beams that you can use the ionizing radiation they have the effect of chemically burning when you like get a tissue it oxidizes the tissue when you are using ionizing radiation the x-ray we use for normal tests that will do our chest x-ray especially if you want to get a job that x-ray can also be used for radiotherapy however the energy level for radiotherapy is in millions of voltage while that's for tests is just in thousands of voltage so if you increase the energy level maybe you use it for treatments so radiotherapy can be used either for radical treatment that's relative treatment or for palliative treatment to treat bones that you know have had spread most of the time chemotherapy is involved in treatment of sarcoma because sarcomas they have tendency to spray because most connective tissue are highly vascularized so kimo is usually involved kimo radio and and surgery a few forms of sarcomas require use of targeted therapy targeted therapy are immunotherapy they are immune therapy designed you know to mimic our own immunity to help treat you know cancers for example we have imatinib for what we call gist gastrointestinal stroma tumor imatinib is one of the type of targeted therapy that we use in sarcoma and they are very effective they may be expensive though but they are effective. Omonotherapy is often not used in treatment of sarcoma so these are the various major ways of course there are other adjunct treatment like the use of painkiller and the use of antibiotics and all that in addition you know to help you know treat the patient but the major treatment are surgery chemotherapy radiotherapy and targeted therapy for sarcomas wow thank thank you so that that puts us in line with most of the treatment options that we have on most cancers are still applicable in sarcomas but it depends on what you have where you are what it is you are will determine what you get now can i ask a very interesting question because misconceptions are very very interesting can you give us the misconceptions about sarcomas because i myself have tried to understand this disease and i'm totally lost i'm not a medical doctor as you most probably know so it is this one is all because i live with the disease but you talk to for instance you talk about the gamma knife i know i know gamma knife and you call it gamma something i call it gamma knife is it the same thing we have gamma knife you have still is practically the therapy all are parts of radiation therapy it's a form of radiotherapy so gamma knife is a more precise type of radiotherapy used for a very small lesion usually at the base of the score or at the brain gamma knife is because you use the word gamma is why i ask because i thought i have had gamma knife that's why i asked you so i thought he used gamma gamma is gamma rays gamma rays yes like i said it could be s-rays it could be gamma rays it could be electron beam it could be proton beam all these are ionizing radiation so gamma knife uses gamma ray we call it gamma knife because it's the dose of radiation you use is so much that as you are irradiating the lesion you are burning of the lesion so it's as if you are literally coating the lesion with irradiation so it's a knife because it's coating the radiation but it is gamma because it's using gamma ray and it is radiotherapy because any form of therapy that uses radiation is radiotherapy so it's a form of radiotherapy okay so now okay based on what you've now said now now let's move on to the next thing so from your take on where we are with this gamma i'm not gamma sorry with sarcomas what would be three main things that you think a sarcoma patient needs to know to be able to help them navigate through the treatment options okay the first thing is that the first time you diagnose it the first time you see it that's the best time to start treatment if there is delay it's worsen prognosis because sarcoma most of the time are vascularized to mouse so because they are vascularized they have tendency to spray it can you tell me what is vascularized in simple english i'm trying to do for my viewers because at the end of the day i am so learned in this thing but yeah when i say it's vascularized i just mean that it has a lot of blood supply blood vessels passes through there because there's a lot of blood supply there's tendency for the vessel to take cancer cells and take the through the blood to other parts of the body and once that is done we say it has metastasized that is that spread and once it spreads it becomes a more complex you know issue it becomes more difficult to treat it's easier to treat it when it's still in the primary site when it's localized when it has not left the primary place than when it has spread so is it a cancer that is visible well it can be visible usually it usually most of the time is visible because it it will come either as a lump usually as a swelling usually lump or swelling and is usually tender over time it may not be tender initially it's with a soft tissue but if it is in the bone it's always painful once it's in the bone it's usually detected by pain most people that has bone sakuma claim that they they had trauma something hits that bone before they started feeling the bone so they associate the cause to the trauma to the bone but we think that the trauma only cause attention to it is because it's there that's why it's more painful during the trauma but whichever way bone tumor is usually associated with trauma why soft tissue sakuma most of the time the patient will say they didn't have nothing happened they just saw a boy growing and that boy transformed into a sakuma that's so sorry for continue at that point i wanted to get that because a lot of people don't understand that part of it okay so you said the first one you were giving me gave us the first point about what we should be aware of okay go on i said three yeah three then secondly chemotherapy does not kill most people most people sakuma they will the people that have told them that chemotherapy can normal say as a kid the cancer cells and and as such i always let people know or my patients know that there is a window what we call therapeutic window the dose that kills the abnormal is different from the dose that will kill the normal cell the dose that killed the normal cell is higher than what killed the normal cell and also the with the dose that killed the cancer cell if there is a damage to the normal cell the chemo is giving in is giving in fractions that is giving at intervals so there is interval for repair of normal cell so at the time you are giving the second cycle or third cycle there would have been the normal cell that have already been repaired but the cancer cell does not have ability to repair so usually as you give it cycles there is cumulative destruction of the cancer cells why the normal cell always gets repaired so there's repair of normal cell there's a sparing of the normal cell and cumulative destruction of cancer cells that's another thing then thirdly we talk of food for most people they hear that when you're having cancer if you don't take a bite it some even say you should not take food at all if you just take vegetables or foods this is this is not correct we all know that you need balance diet to have good immunity you're you need to your body need to be able to fight the cancer cells and to be able to fight you need balance diet so that all the nutrients you need is you will get so you can have good immunity to fight the cancer cells so these are three misconceptions i think should be corrected you've made my day yes if i should add one more to it many people believe that if you have sarcoma you should don't come to the hospital it's a spiritual attack i always let them know that for everything there is a way you do it after none of us sit down at home and pray for money to come for salary you have to go out to work if you can you can you can back your work up with payers the same way even if you think you will be spiritual attack you have to come to the hospital for treatment then back the treatment up with payers if you want to you understand but you can't sit at home and be praying for healing without coming out walking towards the healing if you need healing you come to the appropriate place and some even will tell you is alternative therapy i say you should go for alternative therapy you don't get the alternative results if you want to get the real result you get the real orthodox treatment so don't go look for alternative therapy when you want the real results if you want real results you get the real treatment awesome thank you thank you for preaching this thing i am very grateful because every time i try to say and so that people get it i actually take chemotherapy i don't think anybody can see that and i've taken it today it doesn't mean very much please if you are or giving it to you take it is better to take it and have a chance to fight than to sit down and wait for other people to tell you oh well maybe if you had if you had is late why wait for if you had when you could have had it at the beginning and fought and then done everything doctor have even just explained now i'm going to ask you as you know we are cancer advocacy we actually campaign for the awareness for treatment of cancer patients and we actually need people to be able to survive and i think i've lost one person that has been in your space in the last one year so let me go for the question please share two takeaways from this campaign it's an awareness campaign in my own eye um as we engage i'm specific the public and government support group this type of i want to take away from it as we round up so for support group we are doing a great job as support group most people don't know what sarcoma is and it is by programs like this that you don't then i the the we have a lot of institutions out there that can participate to help your organization NGOs like you because this program is is is for the public and if they can do their social responsibility corporate social responsibility by sponsoring agency like yours we will be for the better for for people out there i think the first time you come to you you you diagnose any swelling or anything like that you go to the hospital because the first time is the best time and then you also get uh the main treatment don't go for orthodox you know if if at all do the main with the orthodox i didn't know if i got your question correctly yes you did actually very spot on thank you thank you very much and doc thank you for for the two key points and they are very good takeaways from us for all those watching and cancer cancer is real it is not running away face it head on as the doctor has explained to us listen to what your doctors are saying don't believe in myths and and and focus on facts because facts especially if you get it from the right doctor you will get what you're looking for and i'm going to give one key point to all anybody taking chemo or trying to take chemo or trying to take see a doctor for cancer the name of the doctor you are looking for is called an oncologist please not every doctor is an oncologist and they are the ones that can give you the chemotherapy so please to the public please always ask questions with whoever is being your doctor going forward doctor abib i want to say very big big big thank you to you for joining us today and for sharing with us you know i may have to call you back again because you know this conversation is not for just today is as we go along we have to keep making our voices heard and from my perspective i am an advocate so i'm pulling you for the advocacy part that is why i asked you the last question i need us all so thank you very much for your time thank you for joining us any last thing you want to say yes i just want to say that chemo trapping may have side effects but they are usually temporary and not every patient have the side effect and when you have the side effects come to your doctor they are palliative for the side effects thank you thank you doc i take chemo so anybody that is worried about chemo please i'm smiling i take chemo i took it today i'll take it later i'm taking it tomorrow don't run away from it you just follow the side effects you cry with the side effects that you move on just don't no big deal to it they always doctors they have all the all the concoctions they need to give you so all those worrying about chemotherapy please don't and i want to take this opportunity now for all of you you can follow us on formal cancer foundation on any of our social media handles we have various activities and we advertise activities we know that we advertise we share activities of other cancer organizations across the country that will benefit so if you have any together we fight together we're going to win the race so let's all work together let's make a difference and let's come to the point you'll find us on all our pages and now we've also got this new one called threads common cancer foundation has now gone on has now got a friend's account as far as i understand i haven't checked it yet but i understand we have one so go and check it out in god look at what's going on and please follow us and if dr habib is nsia nsia please go and check what's going on in nsia lose and you should be able to get information if you're trying to get information on cancer treatment i want to thank you all for watching i want to thank you and we look forward to seeing you again as we come back to this conversation in the next few weeks have a fantastic time thank you all