programssraka.blogg.se - Keymo therapy

Curative chemotherapy: This is given instead of surgery or radiation to eliminate all the cancerous cells in a body.

Adjuvant chemotherapy: This is given after surgery or radiation therapy to destroy any remaining cancer cells and prevent cancer from coming back.

Neoadjuvant chemotherapy: This is given to shrink a tumor’s size before surgery or radiation therapy.

There are four main types of chemotherapy:

It is also used to help kill cancer cells that threaten to spread through the bloodstream, called metastatic or secondary cancer. It may be used to help make other treatments more effective. Chemo is also used to shrink tumors that are causing pain and discomfort. If you or a loved one is diagnosed with cancer, a Yale Medicine medical oncologist will work with you and a multispecialty team of doctors at Yale Cancer Center at Smilow to determine the best way to treat your cancer, based on the latest research and using the most advanced technology available.Ĭhemotherapy refers to drugs used to kill cancer cells or prevent them from multiplying and passing along their DNA mutations. In addition to chemotherapy, other types of cancer treatment include surgery, radiotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, or a combination of these approaches. He is the clinical director of Yale Cancer Center at Smilow Cancer Hospital’s Early Drug Development Program. “Cancer chemotherapy has evolved from a last resort 60 years ago to treatment that now can cure patients or markedly prolong their lives, often with far fewer side effects than with the original drugs decades ago,” says Joseph Paul Eder, MD, a Yale Medicine medical oncologist. To stop their rapid, erratic division, doctors often turn to chemotherapy-drugs designed to destroy cancer cells.Ĭhemotherapy or “chemo” can be used to cure cancer, shrink cancerous tumors, prevent cancer from spreading (metastasizing) elsewhere in the body or to relieve discomfort from a growing tumor. What is so problematic about cancer cells is that they multiply quickly and uncontrollably, creating copies of themselves and passing along their defective DNA.

This can happen in cells located almost anywhere in the body-in the blood, bones, bladder, skin, lymph nodes, breasts, ovaries, and prostate, as well as vital organs such as the brain, liver, lungs, and kidneys. When mutations occur in the DNA within cells in our bodies and these cells survive to divide and replicate, this can cause cancer.