Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Learn more about your chemotherapy drug

By Dr. Bill Ackart

This article has been written due to comprehensive case study. Hopefully it will help you a lot.

Cancer refers to the uncontrolled growth of cells combined with malignant behavior - invasion and metastasis. The cause for this disease is believed to be the interaction of environmental toxins and the genetic susceptibility. Basically, the chemotherapy drug's functioning principle is to impair cell division (mitosis), targeting rapidly-dividing cells. The fact that these drugs destroy cells leads to their being named cytotoxic.

Chemotherapy, generally speaking, implies the treatment of a disease by means of chemicals which kill the sick cells. In more particular terms, chemotherapy is used to kill the cells of micro-organisms or cancer. The most common chemotherapy drug regimen is made up from a combination of antineoplastic medication that represents the cytotoxic standardized treatment. Besides the reference to cancer treatment, chemotherapy also has an antibacterial dimension when it involves the use of antibiotics.

A chemotherapy drug, or better a combination of such drugs, functions by destroying cells that divide quickly. Unfortunately, these drugs also affect/attack other healthy cells that divide rapidly. The collateral casualties produced by a chemotherapy drug are digestive tract linings, the bone marrow and the hair follicles. Thus, the main side effects of chemotherapy will include hair loss, the inflammation of the digestive tract and the reduced production of blood cells.

A chemotherapy drug could also be prescribed for the treatment of other problems such as autoimmune diseases - namely rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. There are newer anti-cancer drugs which were designed to act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this treatment option is known as targeted therapy.

Different classes of chemotherapy drug medication are available at present. Thus there are antimetabolites, alkylating agents, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines and several others. While all these chemicals interfere with the DNA structure, there are newer and revolutionary medicines like the tyrosine kinase inhibitors or the monoclonal antibodies that leave the nucleic acids unaffected.

These ones target a molecular abnormality in particular types of cancer such as gastrointestinal stromal tumors or chronic myelogenous leukemia. More special chemotherapy drug options only change the behavior of the tumor cells without affecting other tissues. From these so-called adjuvant therapies, the hormone treatment will be commonly used.

The decision to administer only one chemotherapy drug or a combination of several medicines belongs to the doctor and it is taken depending on the stage of the disease and the purpose of the treatment.

Thank you for taking you time to read through this information if you're interested in gathering more knowledge please continue to search this site.

About the Author:

No comments:

Post a Comment