How Chemotherapy Works and Chemotherapy Side Effects
Chemotherapy can be given at one or more stages. These are described here:
• Cancer patients may have chemotherapy before surgery (neo-adjuvant therapy) to shrink a tumour so that it’s easier to remove. It’s usually used for tumors that are too large or too attached to surrounding tissue.
• Cancer patients may be given chemotherapy after surgery (adjuvant therapy) to make sure that any cancerous cells left in your body are killed. This makes it less likely that the cancer will come back.
• If cancer patients have advanced cancer, chemotherapy may be used to shrink the tumor, or, if it has spread to other organs, to slow the progress of the disease and prolong your life. This is known as palliative chemotherapy.
There are few factors to determine the type of chemotherapy that cancer patients will have:
• the type of cancer
• where the cancer started
• what the cancer cells look like under a microscope
• whether the cancer has spread to other parts of cancer patient body
• Health condition of cancer patient
Cancer patients may have none of these side effects or just a few. The kinds of side effects cancer patients have and how severe they are, depend on the type and dose of chemotherapy they get and how their body reacts.
Most cancer patients have no serious long-term problems from chemotherapy. However, on some occasions, chemotherapy can cause permanent changes or damage to the heart, lungs, nerves, kidneys, reproductive or other organs. And certain types of chemotherapy may have delayed effects, such as a second cancer, that show up many years later.
Most commonly, chemotherapy destroy cancer cells by stopping them from growing or multiplying. This means that it also harms healthy cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles. Harm to healthy cells is what causes the most common side effects of chemotherapy—myelosuppression (decreased production of blood cells), mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract) and alopecia (hair loss).
Related articles by Cancer Treatment Pro
- Motheroffive dies after being given chemotherapy overdose (telegraph.co.uk)
- Obesity hinders chemotherapy treatment in children with leukemia (scienceblog.com)
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