Seven-year recurrence-free survival following glioblastoma diagnosis: case report and patient experience

Abstract

Glioblastoma is a devastating disease with few effective treatment options beyond first-line, leaving patients to face their terminal diagnosis with little hope. In very rare cases, patients can survive beyond 5 years from diagnosis. However, the literature provides little insight into the underlying causes of this exceptional survival, other than known factors like age, extent of surgical resection, and an absence of co-morbidities and adverse molecular prognostic features such as unmethylated MGMT and wildtype IDH. In this report, the patient, clinicians and researchers collaborated to describe a case of long-term, recurrence-free survival (>7 years despite the poor-prognostic factor of CDKN2A/B deletion). We provide the clinical case-study alongside a first-hand narrative of the patient’s experience and his own, self-directed, therapeutic program that included fasting, hyperbaric oxygen therapy and other complementary therapies. Clinicians rightly focus on the best empirical evidence and may be reluctant to suggest complementary therapies with a lesser base of evidence. On the other hand, patients often value complementary therapies and may pursue their own research in this area. We also present a comprehensive review of complementary therapies used in this case, highlighting the significant body of preclinical scientific research backing some of these approaches. The patient’s own words demonstrate the powerful desire to challenge a terminal diagnosis by any means possible, and we conducted an empirical study of this patient’s experience underpinned by an analysis of current research.