Adjuvant Chemotherapy

Cancer patients may have no other choice but to resort to chemotherapy in order to treat their illness. In oncology, adjuvant chemotherapy will have quite a special role for the patient because it is related to other cancer treatments. Adjuvant chemotherapy is an additional treatment administered to the patient following a surgical intervention as a means to prevent the possible development of the cancer cells that may have remained after the removal. The patient may relapse even if surgery has been performed because unfortunately, medicine is not sufficiently developed to be able to foresee whether cancer cells will reoccur or not.

Chemical-based treatments together with radiotherapy are part of the same adjuvant chemotherapy category prescribed by doctors to stop cancer spread. Statistics indicate that about a third of the patients who have undergone adjuvant chemotherapy treatment have already been completely cured with the help of the surgery alone. For the less fortunate ones, the long term aim of the adjuvant chemotherapy is to increase the life extent of the sufferer.

The types of cancer in which adjuvant chemotherapy is used are quite various and here we may include colon cancer, lung, pancreatic, breast and prostate cancer as well as some forms of gynecological cancers.

Beside the adjuvant chemotherapy, there is also another type of treatment that resembles the former in name; that is, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy. The latter is given to patients before the primary treatment and it may take the form of chemical drug-based treatment. For instance, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy could be used in the case of a breast-cancer patient who will have to undergo surgery for breast removal. The purpose of such a type of therapy is to minimize the size of the tumor so that there are fewer risks and a higher rate of success in the surgical intervention.

All in all, adjuvant chemotherapy has been identified as 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. As for the drug efficiency, the level is a lot higher when the treatment is administered intravenously; another way of enhancing drug effects is to use it locally in the exact body part attacked by cancer.

Filed Under: Chemotherapy