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 represents a first option to fight skin cancer. Anyway, patients should analyze all treatment variants extensively by learning all the can on the implications. First of all, patients ought to understand everything about the treatments. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.

Surgery and melanoma chemotherapy represent the main alternatives here. There are different choices in as far as surgery is concerned, depending on where and how advanced the melanoma is. 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 involved in such procedures normally uses 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. Consequently, all sorts of side effects will become manifest from mouth sores, nausea and vomiting to hair loss, anemia and many others.

Among the melanoma chemotherapy drugs we ought to mention temozolomide, cisplastin, DTIC, tamoxifen, vinblastine and BCNU. Combinations between these various medications are possible and often recommended. DTIC, BCNU and cisplatin combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, bear the name Dartmouth Regimen. Then melanoma is also treated by a combination of vinblastine, cisplastin and DTIC. To give one other melanoma chemotherapy drug example, we ought to refer to temozolomide, a modern medication administered orally.

Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs have a damaging impact on normal blood cells as well, patients might experience low blood cell counts and this can reduce the blood clotting speed for instance, excessive tiredness (frequently because of low red blood cell counts but also because of chemotherapy itself) and an increased chance of infection (because of white blood cell shortage).

Filed Under: Chemotherapy