Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is used to treat cancer. Different chemotherapy drugs are used which eradicates cancerous cell. Over the years, chemotherapy treatment is evolved which increases success rates of survival in cancer patients.

Different types of chemotherapy regimens including adjuvant chemotherapy, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy and combination chemotherapy are used to treat cancer.
Chemotherapy success rates are significantly improved for cancer including breast cancer by targeting patients with the most sensitive tumors. According to doctor, in almost 70 percent of patient, chemotherapy can completely remove the tumors by using the genetic test to select patients. This test will help doctor in a big way to treat breast cancer.

Different chemotherapy treatment including taxanes are introduced which improves success rate of chemotherapy. However, taxanes are more toxic as well as expensive. So, limited patients are benefited from this. Chemotherapy can be applied before surgery is known as preoperative or neo-adjuvant chemotherapy.

When chemotherapy is applied after surgery, it is known as postoperative or adjuvant chemotherapy. Neo-adjuvant chemotherapy is preferred in most case as it helps more to shrink the tumor or to mop up any remaining cancer cells and has been shown to improve survival.

Chemotherapy treatment is usually applied in cycles. Each treatment cycle has treatment period and recovery or rest period. Recovery period is necessary as patient need some time to recover from side effects of treatment.

Frequencies of treatment, no. of cycles are determined by doctor. Doctor takes help of research and clinical trails to determine length of chemotherapy. Length of treatment as well as drugs used and dose are important for chemotherapy success.

Chemotherapy can be more successful when you use combination or mixture of drugs is instead of single drug. This chemotherapy is known as combination chemotherapy. In combination therapy, mixture of two or more chemotherapy drugs is used to treat cancer. These drugs attack all the different kinds of cells in the cancer as cancer is made up of different kinds of cells that may respond differently to any one drug.

In combination chemotherapy, drugs are selected in such a way that they work well together without overlapping their benefits or side effects. Different combination chemotherapy include AT (Adriamycin and Taxotere), CMF (cyclophosphamide, methotrexate, and fluorouracil (5-FU)), FAC (fluorouracil, Adriamycin and cyclophosphamide), GET (Gemzar, epirubin, and Taxol) and more.

Though success rate of chemotherapy treatment are improving day by day, it is also associated with some side effects. Chemotherapy drugs are toxic in nature. These drugs damage healthy cells along with cancerous cell which causes side effects which includes nausea, vomiting, fatigue, sickness, hair loss, memory loss, loss appetite, weight loss, low blood cell count and many more. However, these side effects get disappear once chemotherapy is over.