All You Have to Know about Melanoma Chemotherapy
Posted by on December 24, 2009
A type of skin cancer, melanoma is diagnosed after the appearance of all sorts of dark spots on the epidermis. In order to treat melanoma, diagnostic tests must first be completed and then the cancer team will be able to recommend one or maybe more treatment options. Melanoma chemotherapy is one of the possibilities here. Anyway, patients should analyze all treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. Proper information on the alternative treatments is the first step. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.
Among the treatments for melanoma there are options like surgery and chemotherapy. 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. Unfortunately, if besides melanoma, the cancer has spread to organs as well, surgery will not be the solution. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy could represent the most viable of possibilities. Systemic chemotherapy that the procedure involves uses injectable anticancer drugs.
Drugs are either administered intravenously or orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs get carried to all the body parts by blood. 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. The blood producing cells in the bone marrow, the hair follicles and the cells in the gastrointestinal tract represent the first collateral victims of the chemical cancer bombarding. 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 in combination with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal medication commonly used in treating breast cancer, bear the name Dartmouth Regimen. Then there is another combination of DTIC, cisplatin and vinblastine to use against melanoma. 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, anemia would be certainly diagnosed 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).
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