• Question: why are people with similar diseases receive different treatment

    Asked by anon-324153 on 1 Apr 2022.
    • Photo: Rebecca Locke

      Rebecca Locke answered on 29 Mar 2022:

      To give an example from my experience, someone with cancer might get genetic testing to look the specific mutations in a tumour that are ‘driving’ their cancer. In breast cancer, about 20% to 25% of breast cancers have too much of a protein called human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2), which makes tumor cells grow. If the cancer is “HER2 positive”, you would likely get a different drug treatment than if the cancer is “HER2 negative” because it would be more effective!

    • Photo: Chigozie Onuba

      Chigozie Onuba answered on 30 Mar 2022:

      In terms of blood cancer like leukaemia, you have different types so will require different treatments. So for example the treatment for acute promyelocytic leukaemia(APML) is different from the treatment for acute myeloid leukaemia(AML) or even myeloma another type of blood disorder which is cancer of the plasma cells.

    • Photo: Elpida Vounzoulaki

      Elpida Vounzoulaki answered on 30 Mar 2022:

      It depends on the disease, and also how people react to medication (sometimes people shouldn’t take some medication because there is a contraindication or they can’t tolerate the medication).

      For example for diabetes there are different medications, some of them are pills and some of them are injections.

    • Photo: Sara Luzzi

      Sara Luzzi answered on 31 Mar 2022:

      Some diseases are a bit complicated, for example cancer develops after several things go wrong in our cells and the combination of these things is different across patients. For cancer and other conditions each patient would then have slight differences in their disease, so the treatment has to be thought for their specific case.

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