cancer chemotherapy
As a disease cancer consists of the uncontrolled malignant cellular growth, the invasion of organs and the metastasis. It seams that the cause of the condition is a combination of genetic predisposition and the exposure to some environmental toxins.
Basically, the chemotherapy drug s functioning principle is to impair cell division (mitosis), targeting rapidly-dividing cells. The damage they produce among cells, gives chemotherapy drugs the name of cytotoxic medication.
Chemotherapy, generally speaking, implies the treatment of a disease by means of chemicals which kill the sick cells. Particularly speaking, 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. From a non-oncological perspective, the term chemotherapy also refers to antibiotics this is known as antibacterial chemotherapy.
A chemotherapy drug, or better a combination of such drugs, functions on the principle of cellular destruction. Unfortunately, these drugs also affect/attack other healthy cells that divide rapidly. These other cells that get attacked 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. More modern cancer treatments known as targeted therapy use anti-cancer medication that attacks only the abnormal proteins in cancer cells.
When talking about a chemotherapy drug, we should be aware that there are different types available at present. Thus there are antimetabolites, alkylating agents, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines and several others. Some newer agents, like monoclonal antibodies and tyrosine kinase inhibitors, do not interfere directly with the DNA as do the above mentioned ones.
Such modern drugs target a molecular abnormality in peculiar types of cancer such as chronic myelogenous leukemia or gastrointestinal stromal tumors. More special chemotherapy drug options only change the behavior of the tumor cells without affecting other tissues. Within these adjuvant therapies the option very commonly used is the hormone treatment.
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.
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Tags: Cancer, cells, cellular, chemotherapy, destruction, disease, drug, genetic, growth, kill, malignant, medication, metastasis, predisposition, sick, Treatment
