Mesothelioma Treatment Options – Varied But Limited In Scope
Mesothelioma is a serious type of cancer, which needs the expert help of a specialist. As the treatment demands much skill and expertise, only specialized cancer centers can handle the cases. There are many mesothelioma treatment options in the modern world. Physicians can decide upon the mode and course of treatment after considering the stage of cancer, the area affected by it, age and general health of the patient etc. In majority of the cases, the diagnosis takes place very late and that affects the treatment badly.
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.
Researches are going on to find better mesothelioma treatment options. They include photodynamic therapy, biological therapy, gene therapy, multimodality therapy, immunotherapy etc. These treatment methods have not given a stable result but are increasingly used these days with fluctuating success rates. Ultimately the success of treatment lies in the response of the body to the treatment procedure and its capacity to deal with the vigorous treatment techniques.
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