chemotherapy hair loss

Breast chemotherapy refers to the treatment applied to patients who suffer from breast cancer. The treatment aims at reducing the tumor size and at killing the cells with a rapid multiplication rate. Various kinds of breast chemotherapy can be identified depending on the drug combination chosen by the doctor. Correct information on the way the medication works as well as an analysis of the side effects and the optimistic evaluation factors ought to be part of the discussion between doctor and patient that precedes the treatment as such.

Breast chemotherapy is administered either orally or intravenously and it is usually given in cycles. The drug reaches in the blood and then travels through the whole system attacking cells with a rapid growth rate. The targeted elements of breast chemotherapy are the cancer cells in the mammary glands, but there will be collateral damage to. From this perspective doctors call breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because it may act all throughout the patient’s organism.

Breast chemotherapy may be recommended after lumpectomy or mastectomy and in these conditions it is referred to as adjuvant therapy. The treatment is possible in this form only when medical tests indicate that the cancer is limited to the breast area only.

Another situation when breast chemotherapy represents a necessity is when cancer has spread from the lymph nodes or breast to other parts of the body. This particular spread bears the name of metastatic breast cancer and women rarely have this form at the time of the diagnosis.

Whichever of the breast chemotherapy treatments you are to receive it is important to know how you can figure out if it has any effect. The efficiency of the treatment is not related to side effects: these adverse reactions appear whether the procedure works or not. This would be the wrong approach to it all. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy could show no side effects but the efficiency rate is often very positive in the sense that the spreading of the malevolent cells is stopped.

All in all, breast chemotherapy makes no easy treatment. It is probably the devastating treatment and the mutilation brought by breast cancer in itself that has increased awareness among women, making disease detection a lot easier and in the early stages of development.

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side effects of chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is often the only choice cancer sufferers have to regain a next-to-normal health condition. In oncology, adjuvant chemotherapy plays an important role particularly in combination with other cancer treatments. Adjuvant chemotherapy is an additional treatment given to the patient after surgery to help prevent any cancerous cells that may have not been completely removed during surgery from developing or increasing in number. The health condition is often susceptible to relapses in cancer cases, since no specialist can foresee the evolution or involution of cancer cells.

Radiotherapy or regular chemical-based treatments are included in the adjuvant chemotherapy category and they are recommended by the doctors based on some statistical evidence which is employed in order to figure out whether there is low or high risk in relapse for the patient. Statistics show that about a third of the patients who have received adjuvant chemotherapy treatment have resumed good health only through surgical intervention. For those who are not included in the above mentioned third, the long term objective of the adjuvant chemotherapy is to increase the life extent of the sufferer.

Adjuvant chemotherapy works for lots of cancer typologies from colon cancer to prostrate cancer, lung, breast and pancreatic tumors.

In terms of parallel treatments, adjuvant chemotherapy is complemented by neo-adjuvant chemotherapy. The neo-variant consists in the administration of drugs in the stage preceding the anti-cancer treatment per se. For example, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy could be used in the case of a breast-cancer patient who will undergo breast-removal surgery. The aim of such a type of therapy is to reduce the size of the tumor so that the surgery may be performed more efficiently and with less risk.

All in all, adjuvant chemotherapy is presently considered more effective when it is prescribed after the tumor removal rather than before it because the remaining cancer cells are fewer in number and, as a result, the drug is more powerful on them. The drugs specific to this type of treatment are most efficient when they are administered directly into the blood of the patient, that is, intravenously; another way of enhancing drug effects is to use it locally in the exact body part attacked by cancer.

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