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Cancer patients may have no other choice but to resort to chemotherapy in order to treat their illness. In oncology, adjuvant chemotherapy will have quite a special role for the patient because it is related to other cancer treatments. Adjuvant chemotherapy represents an additional treatment given to the patient after surgery to help prevent any cancerous cells that may have not been completely removed during surgery from developing or increasing in number. The patient may relapse even if surgery has been performed because unfortunately, medicine is not sufficiently developed to be able to foresee whether cancer cells will reoccur or not.

Chemical-based treatments together with radiotherapy are part of the same adjuvant chemotherapy category prescribed by doctors to stop cancer spread. Statistics indicate that about a third of the patients who have received adjuvant chemotherapy treatment have resumed good health only through surgical intervention. For those who are not included in the above mentioned third, the long term aim of the adjuvant chemotherapy is to increase the life extent of the sufferer.

The types of cancer in which adjuvant chemotherapy is used are quite various and here we may include colon cancer, lung, pancreatic, breast and prostate cancer as well as some forms of gynecological cancers.  Read more...

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. Health care providers should not overlook the importance of treatment transparency and the necessity for good communication with the person under medication.

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. The morale of the individual and the feeling that someone is closely advising and supervising him/her are very important in handling such a burden of an illness.

Cancer chemotherapy was first used in the 1940s when doctors prescribed mostly nitrogen mustards and folic acid as antagonist drugs. Since more and more patients turned up to suffer from the same condition, that is cancer, cancer chemotherapy has gradually turned into an industry registering huge success on the market through the wide variety of drugs that it produces. Even though progress has marked the seven decades since the pioneer cancer treatments, the basic principles that shaped cancer chemotherapy have remained the same.  Read more...

Breast chemotherapy is the cancer treatment used when the disease has attacked the mammary glands. 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 reaches in the blood and then travels through the entire body to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. Even though breast chemotherapy is directed at breast cancer, the drugs that are recommended as treatment may act on whatever other unhealthy cells that may have already developed somewhere else than the breast. From this point of view doctors call breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because it may act all throughout the patient’s organism.  Read more...

Chemotherapy as the drug-based cancer treatment involves the elimination of the disease by stopping cancer cells from division. This treatment works by attacking and killing cells which divide very quickly as cancer cells do. Unfortunately, chemotherapy damages cells that have a rapid division process normally encountered with many body functions; this is the case with the cells in the digestive tract, hair follicles and bone marrow.

Hence, the chemotherapy effects usually damage these areas. The most frequent adverse reactions that become manifest during and after chemotherapy include myelosuppresion – decrease in the production of blood cells, mucositis – inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract, and alopecia – hair loss.

Chemotherapy effects or side effects can classified according to the extent of the adverse reactions into long and short term categories. Side effects of chemotherapy represent unwanted symptoms which occur as a direct result of taking a drug. It is not difficult to confuse drug side effects with cancer symptoms. Symptoms characterize the disease in fact, while the side effects represent natural adverse reactions to a chemical invasion in the body. Side effects vary depending on the type of drugs used in the treatment, with the mention that one single form of medication will not trigger all the possible adverse reactions in a patient.  Read more...