Symptoms And Treatment Of Cancer - 1432 Words

The word chemotherapy means the use of any kind of drug to treat a disease, but today, it is most used in a cancer context. These drugs can also be known as cytotoxic (i.e. cell-killing) drugs or as antineoplastic (i.e. anti-cancer) drugs. But what is this complex disease called cancer? Cancer is a multi-step process mainly characterized by uncontrolled cellular growth and proliferation. Chemotherapy is very different from other cancer treatments, such as surgery or radiotherapy. One of the main reasons for this is, although chemotherapy can be used to treat an isolated part of the body, usually it is given to the patient as a systemic treatment. This means the anticancer drug will be distributed throughout the body in order to reach†¦show more content†¦This cycle has five phases and all the steps always lead to the resting phase (called G0), which is also the starting point. When a cell goes through reproduction, 2 new identical cells are produced and, if necessary, each of these 2 cells can enter a new stage of reproduction and generate more cells, and so on. It is important to know about the cell cycle because most of the chemotherapy drugs only have their effects on cells that are actively reproducing. On the other hand, other drugs only kill cells in a specific stage of the cell cycle. This way, by looking at the cell cycle, it is possible to plan a specific treatment for each kind of cancer, depending on the type of cellular behaviour that is presented by the cancerous tissue. One very common, and often very aggressive, characteristic of antineoplastic drugs is the appearance of side effects. Why? The reason is that these drugs are not able to specifically and exclusively target cancer cells and therefore, also affect (kill) normal cells. That is why chemotherapy treatment is given in cycles, i.e., amounts of the drug are given in a specific period of time and then the patient has some time without any drug in order to recover normal cells that were unintentionally killed. Chemotherapy is basically trying to find the balance between killing cancer cells and trying to save normal cells. Chemotherapy has 3 possible aims: cure, control and palliation. Cure: if possible,