Mesothelioma Treatment Options – Varied But Limited In Scope
Mesothelioma patients require urgent medical attention from a specialist. As this cancer is comparatively rare, only specialized cancer centers would have the requisite experience and know how to counter it. A wide range of mesothelioma treatment options is available, but doctors decide the most suited line of action after considering the spread of the cancer, the area affected by it, the age and health of the patient. In most cases, detection takes place only at an advanced stage and therefore, chances of survival becomes difficult.
However, medical practitioners in this field continuously strive to save their patients by resorting to a wide range of treatment tactics. The most followed treatment option is conducting surgery to remove the tumor. Eight different surgery options are evolved. They are palliative surgery for relieving pain and restore functions of affected areas, supportive surgery to assist other mesothelioma treatment options like immunotherapy, reconstructive surgery for restoring the function and appearance of affected organs, debulking surgery for reducing cancerous growth, curative surgery for removing small tumors, staging surgery for determining the stage of the cancer, diagnostic surgery for determining the type of mesothelioma and preventive surgery for removing suspected malignant tissues.
A combination of drugs is used in chemotherapy to destroy the malicious cells and it is the most effective cancer treatment these days. Sometimes drugs are administered intravenously and passed through the blood stream. At times they are injected directly at the most infected areas. Physicians generally use four types of chemotherapy. The symptoms of Mesothelioma are treated using palliative chemotherapy; prevention of cancer reappearance is done by adjuvant chemotherapy and shrinking of cancer before surgery is achieved by neoadjuvant or preoperative chemotherapy. Combined modality chemotherapy is used along with surgery, radiotherapy or other treatment options.
Radiation therapy involves using x-rays, gamma rays, particle rays or proton beams to kill the malignant cells. Most often, radiotherapy is used in combination with surgery and chemotherapy. Intensity Modulated Radiation Therapy, which is a recent breakthrough achievement, tries to administer only the appropriate doses of radiation precisely on the cancerous mass.
Many other modern techniques are used as mesothelioma treatment options, where the success rates have found to be varying. Examples of such therapies are photodynamic therapy, gene therapy, biological therapy, multimodality therapy etc. Success of the treatment depends on the response of the patient towards the treatment process.
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