AIM chemotherapy for soft tissue sarcomas

Chemotherapy is a medical treatment in which anti-cancer drugs are used to treat cancer. In chemotherapy treatment, anti-cancerous drugs are administered which stop or slow down growth of cancerous cell. AIM chemotherapy is used to treat soft tissue sarcomas. AIM chemotherapy is a combination chemotherapy, which include three chemotherapy drugs including doxorubicin, ifosfamide, and mesna.

Soft tissue sarcomas are the tumors, which are most commonly, arise in the extremities. Sarcoma related mortality from extremity occurs most commonly, which is second to metastasis. Effectiveness of chemotherapy  in treating several STDs in children including rhabdomyo sarcoma and Ewing sarcoma. However, its value in treating most other types of primary sarcoma remains controversial.

There are different randomized trials are conducted for chemotherapy for STS with patients having heterogeneous mix of tumor size and grade. These trials have variable results and fail to interpret. Even though these trials have inconsistent data, adjuvant or neo-adjuvant chemotherapy with AIM chemotherapy is commonly used as treatment plan for patients with primary extremit.

AIM chemotherapy when applied as neo- adjuvant chemotherapy has improved disease-specific survival. Also overall improvement appears to be driven by the benefit of AIM chemotherapy on disease specific survival for patient with tumors more than 10 cm. Average median survival for patient with more than 10 cm tumor is 3 years.

AIM Chemotherapy Side Effects

Generally, AIM chemotherapy is well tolerated by patients. However, patient taking AIM chemotherapy can suffer from some side effects. These side effects include neutropenia, thrombocytopenia and sometime anemia. In some cases, the side effects of AIM chemotherapy can be fatal. The decision to apply neo adjuvant chemotherapy with AIM should be made with keeping these potential toxic side effects in mind.

AIM chemotherapy (as neo adjuvant chemotherapy) is associated with a significant improvement in disease specific survival in patients with high-grade extremity soft tissue sarcomas more than 10 cm. There is need for further clinical studies of neo-adjuvant or adjuvant chemotherapy for patients with high-grade extremity sarcomas.

Though AIM chemotherapy is effective for most of the patient, some patients are unresponsive to this chemotherapy treatment. However today, there are woefully inadequate options for treatment which underline the need to screen and identify new therapeutic treatments to improve response rates and extend improve survival in patients with high-grade extremity sarcoma. By developing such agents, one can hope to have more significant improvements in response rate and survival using neo adjuvant therapy.