chemotherapy treatment

As a disease cancer consists of the uncontrolled malignant cellular growth, the invasion of organs and the metastasis. It seams that the cause of the condition is a combination of genetic predisposition and the exposure to some environmental toxins. Basically, the chemotherapy drug’s functioning principle is to impair cell division (mitosis), targeting rapidly-dividing cells. The damage they produce among cells, gives chemotherapy drugs the name of cytotoxic medication.

Chemotherapy, generally speaking, implies the treatment of a disease by means of chemicals which kill the sick cells. In more particular terms, chemotherapy aims at destroying cancer and invasive micro-organisms that remain unaffected to other forms of treatment. Chemotherapy usually refers to antineoplastic drugs which are used to treat cancer or to the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. Besides the reference to cancer treatment, chemotherapy also has an antibacterial dimension when it involves the use of antibiotics.

A chemotherapy drug, or the drug cocktail established by the doctor, functions on the principle of cellular destruction. Unfortunately, these drugs also affect/attack other healthy cells that divide rapidly. These other cells that get attacked by a chemotherapy drug are cells in the hair follicles, bone marrow and digestive tract. These results on the normal rapid-dividing cells are the side effects of chemotherapy: alopecia – hair loss, myelosuppression – decreased production of blood cells, and mucositis – inflammation of the digestive tract.

Among the other uses of the chemotherapy drug and cytostatic chemotherapy agents there are the treatment of autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis) and the suppression of transplant rejections. There are newer anti-cancer drugs which were designed to act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this treatment option is known as targeted therapy.

Different classes of chemotherapy drug medication are available at present. Thus there are antimetabolites, alkylating agents, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines and several others. Some newer agents, like monoclonal antibodies and tyrosine kinase inhibitors, do not interfere directly with the DNA as do the above mentioned ones.

These ones target a molecular abnormality in peculiar types of cancer such as chronic myelogenous leukemia or gastrointestinal stromal tumors. Besides these, there is also the category of drugs that modulate the tumor cell behavior without directly attacking those cells. From these so-called adjuvant therapies, the hormone treatment will be commonly used.

Depending on the stage of the disease and the aim of the treatment, doctors will choose to administer one chemotherapy drug or a combination of drugs according to one or another of the existing strategies.

chemotherapy treatment

Once a patient is diagnosed with cancer, it is required that the doctor recommend him/her the appropriate types and dosages of cancer chemotherapy drugs. It is highly important that doctors take enough time and display enough patience in talking to the patient suffering from such a serious condition. The doctor-patient relationship is almost as important nowadays as the suggested cancer chemotherapy is because offering a good treatment without carefully explaining the steps to follow and the potential side effects that may appear along the way may completely discourage the patient. When there is professional support and human compassion in the approach to the illness, cancer patients have higher chances of recovery thanks to the positive attitude.

Cancer chemotherapy was first used in the 1940s when doctors prescribed mostly nitrogen mustards and folic acid as antagonist drugs. With the growing number of tumor cases, cancer chemotherapy has apparently become an industry registering huge success on the market through the wide variety of drugs that it produces. Even though one may think that the world has impressively evolved since the 1940s, it is surprisingly enough to mention that most of the principles discovered back then in cancer chemotherapy still apply today.

Sometimes cancer chemotherapy seems not to be efficient enough to stop the growth of cancer cells. As a result, where combined chemotherapy fails, surgery has to take the lead. This procedure is not always one hundred percent certain in removing entirely the tumor and there are still chances that the cancerous cells may reoccur. So doctors and researchers have come up with an adjuvant cancer chemotherapy treatment that relies on drugs meant to prevent the recurrence of cancer and clear away any signs of cancer left after removing the tumor. This cancer chemotherapy adjuvant appears to have improved and extended the life expectations of many patients suffering from colon cancer.

Chemotherapy means drugs that have various purposes and patients should learn what types of drugs they are using and what risks or side effects these drugs pose. The categories in which chemical drugs fall are pretty numerous but there are lots of sources to be consulted either under the form of books in libraries or text posted on Internet sites. Whichever the medium of information, keep in mind the fact that the benefits and the risks brought about by a certain medication have to be carefully investigated and analyzed in the context of a patient’s medical history.

chemotherapy protocol

Breast chemotherapy refers to the treatment applied to patients who suffer from breast cancer. Its purpose is to kill or to reduce in size the tumor consisting of cells that multiply very quickly compared to the normal rate of multiplication of normal cells. Breast chemotherapy can be of very many kinds depending on the combination of drugs that the doctor has selected for you. Correct information on the way the medication works as well as an analysis of the side effects and the optimistic evaluation factors ought to be part of the discussion between doctor and patient that precedes the treatment as such.

Breast chemotherapy is administered either orally or intravenously and it is usually given in cycles. The drug passes in the blood and then is carried through the whole system to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. The targeted elements of breast chemotherapy are the cancer cells in the mammary glands, but there will be collateral damage to. From this perspective doctors consider breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because it may act all throughout the patient’s organism.

Breast chemotherapy may be recommended after lumpectomy or mastectomy and in these conditions it is referred to as adjuvant therapy. The patients undergo this type of treatment only when doctors are certain from analyses that cancer has not yet spread to any other parts of the body but the breast.

Another situation when breast chemotherapy represents a necessity is when cancer has spread from the lymph nodes or breast to other parts of the body. This particular spread bears the name of metastatic breast cancer and it usually represents the ultimate and often lethal form of development.

Is the breast chemotherapy treatment effective or not? Can one tell without a doctor’s opinion? The efficiency of the treatment is not related to side effects: these adverse reactions appear whether the procedure works or not. Such an investigation approach is totally incorrect. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy could show no side effects but it has always proved to be very helpful as it impedes unhealthy cells from spreading or redeveloping in your body.

All in all, breast chemotherapy makes no easy treatment. It is probably the devastating treatment and the mutilation brought by breast cancer in itself that has increased awareness among women, making disease detection a lot easier and in the early stages of development.