Facts About Melanoma Chemotherapy
Surely you will learn a thing or two by reading the following article.
Melanoma is a type of cancer that affects the skin and is recognized by the dark spots that appear on the dermis. These skin surface formations do not represent the only symptoms of the disease, more conclusive tests are performed before passing the initial cancer diagnosis and establishing a potential treatment. Melanoma chemotherapy represents a first option to fight skin cancer. Anyway, patients should consider these treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. Proper information on the alternative treatments is the first step. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.
Among the treatments for melanoma there are options like surgery and chemotherapy. There are different choices in as far as surgery is concerned, depending on where and how advanced the melanoma is. Thus doctors might consider re-excision, amputation or lymph node dissection. If melanoma has spread from the skin to distant organs, then surgery will not be a curable option to use. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy might be the solution. Systemic chemotherapy that is normally involved in the procedure uses injectable anticancer drugs.
Drugs are either administered intravenously or orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs get carried to all the body parts by blood. The direct impact of the active substances will be on the cancer cells affecting skin, organs and lymph nodes. The same medication that kills the tumor will also damage some healthy tissues too. 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.
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. The above three combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, bear the name Dartmouth Regimen. Then there is another combination of DTIC, cisplatin and vinblastine to use against melanoma. 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 have a damaging impact on normal blood cells as well, patients might experience low blood cell counts and this can lead to bleeding or bruising after even minor cuts or injuries, fatigue (frequently because of low red blood cell counts but also because of chemotherapy itself) and an increased infection risk (because the number of blood cells drops too).
