Melanoma Chemotherapy

A type of skin cancer, melanoma is diagnosed after the appearance of all sorts of dark spots on the epidermis. These skin surface formations do not represent the only symptoms of the disease, more conclusive tests are performed before passing the initial cancer diagnosis and establishing a potential treatment. Melanoma chemotherapy is one of the possibilities here. Anyway, patients should analyze all treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. First of all, patients ought to understand everything about the treatments. The procedure will normally be established depending on the disease evolution and the thickness of the primary tumor.

Surgery and melanoma chemotherapy represent the main alternatives here. The diversity of choices increases when it comes to determining the most advantageous form of surgery for the evolution and the location of the melanoma. Thus there are lymph node dissection, re-excision and amputation to decide on. If melanoma has spread from the skin to distant organs, then surgery will not be a curable option to use. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy could represent the most viable of possibilities. Systemic chemotherapy that the procedure involves relies on injectable anticancer drugs.

These are usually injected into a vein or taken orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs travel through the bloodstream to all parts of the body. They attack cancer cells which have already spread beyond the skin to lymph nodes or other organs. The drugs kill cancer cells but, unfortunately they also destroy some normal cells as well. Among these normal cells that can be killed are blood-producing cells of the bone marrow, cells that line the gastrointestinal tract and cells of hair follicles. As a result, patients will go through temporary side effects like nausea and vomiting, mouth sores, loss of appetite and loss of hair.

Among the melanoma chemotherapy drugs we ought to mention temozolomide, cisplastin, DTIC, tamoxifen, vinblastine and BCNU. DTIC can be used alone or with other chemotherapy drugs like BCNU and cisplatin. DTIC, BCNU and cisplatin in combination with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, are known as the Dartmouth Regimen. Then melanoma is also treated by a combination of vinblastine, cisplastin and DTIC. Temozolomide is a newer medicine, whose mode of function is similar to that of DTIC, except that it is used in the form of a pill.

Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs have a damaging impact on normal blood cells as well, anemia would be certainly diagnosed and this can lead to bleeding or bruising after even minor cuts or injuries, excessive tiredness (experienced because of the anemia and the medical treatment in itself) and an increased chance of infection (because the number of blood cells drops too).

Filed Under: Chemotherapy