Chemotherapy is a form of treating cancer that involves medication. These drugs typically work by killing cells that divide rapidly, which is a characteristic of most cancer cells. Unfortunately, this also implies that these drugs will also kill healthy cells that also have this same feature, such as the cells in hair, in the bone marrow, and your digestive tract. As a result, the common side effects of chemotherapy are hair loss, inflammation in this tract (typically leads to vomiting), and the suppression of the immune system due the effects on bone marrow.
Cancer is thought an uncontrolled growth of cells that have malignant and metastatic behavior. Various other words, these cells invade other cells and subsequently spread from organ to organ. Cancer may be caused by genetic defects, environmental causes or a combination of both.
Chemotherapeutic drugs are designed to impair cell division (mitosis) and are targeted toward faster dividing types of cells. As a result, cancers that involve faster cell division tend to be more sensitive to chemotherapy treatment while cancers with slower growth rates do not respond as well to the treatment methods.
At present, you cannot find any known cure for mesothelioma. However, the chemotherapy drug Cisplatin in combination with permetrexed has been demonstrated to increase survival time in patients who were never candidates for surgery. In the study mentioned previously, this combination increased survival time by a nothing more than three months in patients who were treated only with this chemotherapy.
In 2009, the FDA approved the mix of conventional treatments such as surgery with radiation or chemotherapy in the relief of mesothelioma. This was for patients diagnosed at earlier stages of the virus. A study by Duke University, which indicated a 50 point increase in the price of remission, was the impetus in this approval.
Generally speaking, the most beneficial treatment of mesothelioma involves a mixture of treatments. In cases when patients are candidates for surgery, because when the tumor is more localized, the combination of chemotherapy and surgery has been demonstrated to increase lifetime substantially. In fact, when mesothelioma is diagnosed at an entirely early stage, life expectancy has been increased by five years or more.
Due to it is likely that many more cases of mesothelioma arising in the future because of the slow development of your disease and continued use of asbestos in some countries, there will be continued research in the treatment of mesothelioma.
In fact, is no some promise shown by some non-chemotherapy drugs in dealing the disease. The drug temsirolimus, a kinase inhibitor used to care for renal cancer, with such drug.
With this in mind, any patient diagnosed with mesothelioma should do some study to find out what are incredibly best treatment options simply because condition. The devastating effects of illness are providing researchers with the motivation to develop new therapies, and thus providing hope for new breakthroughs in the foreseeable future.
