Jimmy Carter: I No Longer Need Cancer Treatment

91-year-old's cancer battle appears to be over
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 7, 2016 1:27 AM CST
Jimmy Carter: I No Longer Need Cancer Treatment
Jimmy Carter delivers a lecture on the eradication of the Guinea worm at the House of Lords in London last month.   (Neil Hall/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Jimmy Carter's battle with cancer appears to have ended in a knockout victory for Jimmy Carter. The 91-year-old former president, who was diagnosed with melanoma on the brain last summer and declared cancer-free in December, told the Sunday school class he teaches in Georgia that he no longer needs treatment for the disease, which he feared would kill him within weeks of the initial diagnosis, CNN reports. Carter, who will continue to receive scans to make sure the disease has not returned, was treated with radiation, surgery, and a form of immune-boosting treatment that experts have called a game changer for patients with melanoma.

"It's a treatment called immuno-therapy and it removed the obstacles to my own immune system to fight against cancer, basically—it's kind of complicated," Carter told the class at Maranatha Baptist Church in his hometown of Plains, per WXIA. "But it's worked very well for me and I had an MRI for two hours and 10 minutes and then the doctors determined that I didn't need any more treatment." An American Cancer Society spokesman tells the AP that Carter was treated with Keytruda, a relatively new immune-boosting drug, and the decision to stop treatment was clearly "based on individual evidence specific to the president and made with his doctors." (More Jimmy Carter stories.)

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