Clinical definitions of oncologic terms help clarify the goals and progress of therapy. For a potential cure, a complete remission or complete response must be achieved, which requires disappearance of clinically evident disease. Such patients may appear to be cured but may still have viable neoplastic cells that will, in time, cause relapse. A patient may also have no response. Similarly, the duration of response is the time from partial response to the time of overt progression.
Survival is the time from diagnosis to death.
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