Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Mesothelioma Treatment Options - Which One Suits You Perfectly?

By Heidi Wingrain

Mesothelioma is a serious type of cancer, which needs the expert help of a specialist. As the treatment demands much skill and expertise, only specialized cancer centers can handle the cases. There are many mesothelioma treatment options in the modern world. Physicians can decide upon the mode and course of treatment after considering the stage of cancer, the area affected by it, age and general health of the patient etc. In majority of the cases, the diagnosis takes place very late and that affects the treatment badly.

However, medical practitioners in this field continuously strive to save their patients by resorting to a wide range of treatment tactics. The most followed treatment option is conducting surgery to remove the tumor. Eight different surgery options are evolved. They are palliative surgery for relieving pain and restore functions of affected areas, supportive surgery to assist other mesothelioma treatment options like immunotherapy, reconstructive surgery for restoring the function and appearance of affected organs, debulking surgery for reducing cancerous growth, curative surgery for removing small tumors, staging surgery for determining the stage of the cancer, diagnostic surgery for determining the type of mesothelioma and preventive surgery for removing suspected malignant tissues.

Chemotherapy, which uses a combination of drugs to destroy malignant cells, is the most effective cancer treatment presently available. Drugs are intravenously administered and passed through the bloodstream, but in some cases, drugs are injected directly at the most affected areas. Four types of chemotherapy is resorted to by physicians, namely, palliative chemotherapy for treating the symptoms of mesothelioma, combined modality chemotherapy which is used in combination to surgery, radiotherapy or other treatments available, adjuvant chemotherapy for preventing cancer reappearance and neoadjuvant or preoperative chemotherapy for shrinking the cancer before surgery.

Radiotherapy is often used in combination with surgery and chemotherapy. Radiation therapy uses gamma rays and particle rays to kill the destructive cells. Then there is the Intensity modulated radiation therapy, which administers only the requisite doses of radiation exactly on the cancerous cells.

Researches are going on to find better mesothelioma treatment options. They include photodynamic therapy, biological therapy, gene therapy, multimodality therapy, immunotherapy etc. These treatment methods have not given a stable result but are increasingly used these days with fluctuating success rates. Ultimately the success of treatment lies in the response of the body to the treatment procedure and its capacity to deal with the vigorous treatment techniques.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment