Russian doctor holds world record for cancer tumor removal
Russian doctors set a world record by removing cancer tumors. A team of surgeons at a cancer hospital in the country’s second largest city, St. Petersburg, removed 170 metastases from a patient’s lungs on Tuesday.
According to the press service of the clinic, on Tuesday, the doctors of the NN Petrov National Medical Research Center of Oncology, one of the cancer hospitals in Moscow, removed these metastases from the lungs of a 37-year-old patient through 6 surgeries. This surgery took several hours. On Wednesday, citing hospital authorities, Russian media RT International reported that in the history of cancer treatment in the world, there has never been a case of removing such a large amount of metastasis from a patient’s body.
Metastasis is the maturation stage of cancer cells. If there is a cancerous tumor in any part of the body, at some point the mature cancer cells from that tumor spread throughout the body through the blood. Cancer cells gradually attack healthy cells as well. NN Petrov National Medical Research Center of Oncology is one of the largest and most modern cancer treatment centers in Russia. According to hospital sources, osteosarcoma, a special bone cancer, was detected in the patient’s body in 2020.
After several rounds of chemotherapy in Moscow and Germany, he was able to initially stop the spread of cancer in the body, but he could not be completely free from danger. Because, in addition to shrinking the spread of cancer, he also needed to remove the cancer cells from the body. For this reason, he first underwent surgery in Germany. But the German surgeons were able to remove only 10 to 15 metastases in that surgery.
Note, according to the German protocol, doctors should not remove more than 10 to 15 metastases during a single surgery.
Yevgeny Levshenko, head of the thoracic cancer department at the N.N. Petrov National Medical Research Center of Oncology Hospital, told RT that metastasis surgery is much more difficult and time-consuming than tumor surgery. It also takes a long time for the patient to overcome the stress of this operation. For this reason, most doctors end the surgery by removing 30 to 40 metastases from the patient’s body. Levshenko also said, “The operation we performed on Tuesday was young, and given his physical condition, we felt that he would be able to withstand the rigors of surgery.” That is why we dared to do this.
