Melanoma Chemotherapy
Friday, June 26th, 2009A 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 extensively by learning all the can on the implications. First of all, patients ought to understand everything about the treatments. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.
Surgery and melanoma chemotherapy represent the main alternatives here. 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 doctors might consider re-excision, amputation or lymph node dissection. Unfortunately, if besides melanoma, the cancer has spread to organs as well, surgery will not be the solution. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy might be the solution. Systemic chemotherapy that the procedure involves relies on injectable anticancer drugs.
These are usually injected into a vein or taken orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs travel through the bloodstream to all parts of the body. The direct impact of the active substances will be on the cancer cells affecting skin, organs and lymph nodes. 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.
chemotherapy for metastatic melanoma
Melanoma chemotherapy drugs include temozolomide, cisplatin, vinblastine, DTIC, BCNU and tamoxifen. DTIC can be used alone or with other chemotherapy drugs like BCNU and cisplatin. DTIC, BCNU and cisplatin combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, bear the name Dartmouth Regimen. Then melanoma is also treated by a combination of vinblastine, cisplastin and DTIC. Temozolomide is a newer medicine, whose mode of function is similar to that of DTIC, except that it is used in the form of a pill.
Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs kill normal blood cells as well, patients might experience low blood cell counts and this can reduce the blood clotting speed for instance, fatigue (experienced because of the anemia and the medical treatment in itself) and an increased chance of infection (because the number of blood cells drops too).