Breast Chemotherapy

Breast chemotherapy is the cancer treatment used when the disease has attacked the mammary glands. Its purpose is to kill or to reduce in size the tumor consisting of cells that multiply very quickly compared to the normal rate of multiplication of normal cells. Breast chemotherapy can be of very many kinds depending on the combination of drugs that the doctor has selected for you. That is why it is highly important that patients and their family ask for clarifications from their doctors in case they havent understood how it all works and that they also know what side effects may be expected as a result of the medication.

Breast chemotherapy is administered either orally or intravenously and it is usually given in cycles. The drug reaches in the blood and then is carried through the whole system to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. Even though breast chemotherapy is directed at breast cancer, the drugs that are recommended as treatment may act on whatever other unhealthy cells that may have already developed somewhere else than the breast. From this point of view doctors call breast chemotherapy a systemic form of treatment precisely because its effects are extended to the entire body structure.

Breast chemotherapy is often prescribed 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 becomes necessary is when cancer has spread from the lymph nodes or breast to other parts of the body. This particular cancer invasion is known as 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.

Filed Under: Chemotherapy