Are there advantages to receiving chemotherapy for cancer before surgery? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Neoadjuvant chemotherapy translates to chemotherapy for cancer before surgery, with a recent study demonstrating its benefit for people with esophagus cancer. Kimmel Cancer Center director William Nelson at Johns Hopkins says this strategy is time tested.

Nelson: Neoadjuvant therapy is actually quite an old concept, has been going on for longer than you might think. It had a number of advantages early on, it still does. You can get a sense for instance for how well the treatment works. You look at neoadjuvant therapy for breast cancer, you can then at the time of surgery you can see how much did the cancer really shrink or did it go completely away. If that's the future of these where we are going to be able to hopefully use treatments that get ever better and better and we don't need to do surgery or radiation therapy or anything afterwards bring it on if that's where we're headed.  :31

Nelson notes that people being treated also like the neoadjuvant approach because they are more confident in the approach being used to treat their disease. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.