Jimmy Carter says brain scans show no signs of cancer

Jill Stuckey who attended the service Sunday and is also a Carter family friend said when the former president made his announcement the church erupted in applause.

Jimmy Carter says an MRI shows no new cancer spots on his brain – and that the old spots doctors originally discovered are gone.

Carter said in a statement Sunday that he will continue to receive doses of Keytruda every three weeks. As understandable as this testimonial is, offered from a loving grandson, it’s exactly the kind of language that’s harmful to cancer patients.

Not seeing any cancer on imaging tests is promising, but a physician can not be 100% certain that means a cancer will not return.

“I’m feeling better than anybody expected me to so I’m still maintaining a pretty normal schedule, I’d say”, Carter told NPR during an interview last month. Doctors didn’t find cancer signs during his recent scan. “Two of the new cancer drugs cost more than $35,000 each per month of treatment”.

Because immune cells readily pass through the blood-brain barrier, immunotherapy drugs have shown promise in both killing cancer cells in the brain and preventing cancer from spreading further throughout the body, Lichtenfeld and Demopoulos said. ‘He’s not going to stop doing the treatment, but at this point, there’s no cancer.

Carter was first diagnosed in August after a mass was removed from his liver.

The Food and Drug Administration gave Keytruda accelerated approval in 2014 for patients, like Carter, whose melanoma has spread.

“What Keytruda and similar drugs do is wake up the immune system and allow the immune system to recognize that these cancer cells are not normal and foreign so go after them”, said Lichtenfeld. These drugs interfere with that process, so, by interfering with that shutdown process, they allow the immune system to do its job. One of the interesting things about these drugs is that as they wake up the immune system. This is how our body kicks a cold or the flu. Carter has stage 4 melanoma, meaning it has spread around his body. Reuters reports that about 30% of people treated with pembrolizumab experience significant tumor shrinkage.