WHAT IS REMISSION, CURE?
There is a subtle difference between the terms “remission” and “cure”. Remission is a term coined by oncologists to designate a situation in which 1) the disease is undetectable by the diagnostic methods used, or 2) the disease is still detectable, but the amount of neoplastic cells is so small as not to produce symptoms. Let us give you some examples: In CML, we can define remissions by various criteria. The first is what we call “hematologic remission”. That means, basically, that your blood counts are normal, and your bone marrow biopsy has the appearance of a normal one (normal cellularity, no abnormally looking cells, no fibrosis). If we go further and study the aspect of the chromosomes in your bone marrow cells (which we call doing a “karyotype analysis”), then we might find or not that famous abnormal chromosome called Philadelphia (PH), which is found in over 90% of CML cases and functions as a marker for the disease. If we can’t find it, we say that the patient is in “cytogen
