The problem with glioblastoma is that completely removing all the visible tumor --as the surgeon did
with McCain's tumor -- isn't curative. By the time glioblastoma is diagnosed, it's usually seeded itself in other areas in the brain. So they removed everything they could see in the primary site, but he needs further treatment to fight cancer cells in the rest of his brain.
https://www.statnews.com/2017/07/19/heres-know-sen-john-mccains-brain-cancer-diagnosis/
What treatments come next?
According to the note from McCain’s physicians, “treatment options may include a combination of chemotherapy and radiation.” But it’s not clear yet what the timetable is for those treatments. For now, McCain is home in Arizona. “Further consultations with Senator McCain’s Mayo Clinic care team will indicate when he will return to the United States Senate,” his office said in a statement.
What’s the prognosis?
Not good. After undergoing surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy, some 70 percent of patients suffer further spread of their glioblastoma along with such serious side effects as cognitive decline and strokes. In a statement, McCain’s physicians said that “the tissue of concern was completely resected by imaging criteria,” meaning that when they performed the procedure to remove a blood clot above his left eye last week they got everything that was visible. Unfortunately, “micro-metastases” — just a few malignant cells that spread from the initial tumor — cannot be seen on CT or MRI scans. Barely 5 percent of patients with glioblastoma are alive after five years, and only half make it past 15 months.
= new reply since forum marked as read
The statistics are somewhat better than they were ten years ago. Hopefully they will continue to develop treatments that extend life even longer.
But this is a huge blow.
She lost her father to the same disease a few years ago.
Cancer knows no boundaries. 
Pshaw!
Thanks.
an ADJUNCT to standard treatments, not as a replacement. The findings are that adjusting diet can help improve outcomes.
"Hence, the RKD can be an effective non-toxic therapeutic option to the current standard of care."
"to the current standard of care" are the rest of the words to take note of here.
I'm highly interested in the ways diet can work in disease treatment. Appreciate you mentioning this!
I haven't always agreed with the man, but I respect his Patriotism and his service to our Country. And I hope he beats this.
As I posted above, I am skeptical of this claim. Apparently, so are oncologists, like David Gorski.
Here's his summary of ketogenic diets.
Clearly, ketogenic diets are not ready for prime time as a treatment for cancer, either alone or in combination with conventional therapy. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped it from being touted by all manner of alternative cancer practitioners (i.e., quacks) and others as a cancer cure that “they” don’t want you to know about or saying things like, “…it’s nothing short of medical malpractice and negligence to fail to integrate this type of dietary strategy into a patient’s cancer treatment plan,” as Joe Mercola did. Dr. Seyfried himself has contributed to the hyperbole quite a bit as well. For example:
"These studies are all in combination with either radiation or chemotherapy. My preference is to start metabolic therapy with GBM (glioblastoma multiforme). This is a devastating type of brain cancer. Metabolic therapy with a restricted KD could be done with a few tumors where you know the conventional standard of care doesn’t work at all. You would choose those kinds of patients and do a clinical trial based on historical controls and see what the outcome would be and see if you could get some level of survival that would match or be better than the conventional standard of care."
Regular readers of SBM should know the problem with this sort of approach. No IRB worth its salt would approve such a trial because it would be ethically dubious, but, even worse, it would be ethically dubious and it wouldn’t really tell us anything unless those few patients either had near-miraculous responses or died very quickly. Anything else would simply tell us that the diet is probably doing no harm. More numbers would be needed, particularly if the comparison is to historical controls, to get even an inkling of whether there might be benefit. In that case, you might as well do a proper phase I/II clinical trial, which is what is happening.
(Snip links to current trials)
In other words, clinical data should be rolling in fairly soon, and that’s a good thing. In the meantime Dr. Seyfried and other advocates who so passionately believe that ketogenic diets will greatly help patients with brain cancer do no one any favors by claiming unequivocally that cancer is a metabolic disease and saying that ketogenic diets are more beneficial than chemotherapy for patients with brain tumors.
Much, much more at link.
Ketogenic diets for cancer -- hype vs science (At Science-Based Medicine Blog)
Apparently my skepticism is well placed. The studies cited in this thread are at best preliminary and apparently unblinded. (Not sure how one would blind somebody's diet, however.) As Dr. Gorski says, there are some stage I/II clinical trials in the works. So we may know the facts soon enough. And in conjunction with standard treatment, the diet at least seems to do no harm, although a few patients in the pilot trials seemingly could not tolerate it and dropped out, which should be a bit worrisome to folks promoting it. Then, there's the issue that a main proponent of ketogenic diets for cancer has associated with the utter quack Joseph Mercola.
My best to you all.
