Mesothelioma Legal Advice

adjuvant chemotherapy

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 principle that makes a chemotherapy drug functional is the impairment of the cellular division of tissues with a fast growth rate. 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. Particularly speaking, 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. From a non-oncological perspective, the term chemotherapy also refers to antibiotics – this is known as antibacterial chemotherapy.

A chemotherapy drug, or better a combination of such drugs, functions on the principle of cellular destruction. Unfortunately, these drugs cannot make a selection between normal fast-dividing body cells and cancer cells. These other cells that get attacked by a chemotherapy drug are digestive tract linings, the bone marrow and the hair follicles. 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. Most of the drugs can be divided into alkylating agents, antimetabolites, plant alkaloids, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines, and other antitumor agents. While all these chemicals interfere with the DNA structure, there are newer and revolutionary medicines like the tyrosine kinase inhibitors or the monoclonal antibodies that leave the nucleic acids unaffected.

Such modern drugs target a molecular abnormality in particular types of cancer such as gastrointestinal stromal tumors or chronic myelogenous leukemia. 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.