Chemotherapy To Kill Or Damage Cancer Cells In The Body!

Chemotherapy travels in your blood stream and can reach cancer cells that may have not been removed by surgery in distant organs.

Chemotherapy, a non-surgical treatment, refers to medications used in treating cancer.

Chemotherapy is used to breast cancer in three ways: as a main treatment for advanced cancers, as adjuvant therapy to prevent recurrence and to relieve from cancer symptoms that have spread.

Cancers develop away from original tumors, called as metastases.

These tiny metastases cannot be detected even with scans and blood tests. Therefore, chemotherapy is used to reduce the number of recurrences in women who are cured after the diagnosis of breast cancer. Whether breast cancer chemotherapy is suitable for you depends on the risk which is determined by your doctor and reports.

Eliminating Breast cancer tumors with Roche’s Herceptin Combined With Chemotherapy Than Chemotherapy Alone:

Roche’s Herceptin drug combined with chemotherapy is three times more effective in eradicating tumors in women with inflammatory breast cancer than chemotherapy alone.

FDA has approved Herceptin drug for advanced HER2-positive cancer treatment that has spread away from the breast. According to the new research, women who received Herceptin and chemotherapy combination noticed complete disappearance of the tumors from breast, compared in women who received chemotherapy alone.

Chemotherapy For Advanced Colorectal Cancer Prolongs Survival Of Patients:

Modern chemotherapy treatment for advanced colorectal cancer, such as oxaliplatin, irinotecan and molecular targeted elements are successful in extending the patient’s lives by several months. Although patients are surviving for several months, multidrug combinations often have serious toxic effects.

A Breast Tumor’s Response To Chemotherapy Can Be Accurately Detected By PET Scans:

Positron emission tomography (PET) that uses a sugar molecule is more useful than mammography and ultrasound in predicting the response of breast tumour to chemotherapy and therefore patient can survive ultimately.

PET works by injecting a sugar molecule (FDG), marked with a radioactive tracer into the person suffering from breast tumor. The molecule is metabolically active and concentrates in tumor tissue where it emits energy that PET scanning can detect. PET measures standard uptake values (SUV) or how much sugar molecule has accumulated in the tumor.

If the standard uptake values drop after chemotherapy, it shows that there are few or no cancer cells available where the sugar molecules can accumulate. Using the PET technology is advancing all the time.

Short term and long term side effects of chemotherapy:

Chemotherapy drugs will have side effects. Chemotherapy damages the dividing, so the parts of the body where normal cells divide often are likely to be affected by chemotherapy. Your skin, hair, mouth, bone marrow and intestine are affected by chemotherapy.

Some side effects of chemotherapy are serious medical conditions that need to be treated. Some may be inconvenient but do not damage your health. Side effects of chemotherapy are mostly short term. The treatment does not cause side effects in every one. Side effects will disappear slowly once the treatment is stopped.