Cancer Doctors Hold Breakthrough Options in Treatment for Mesothelioma, though Prognosis Remains Desperate
July 10th, 2009Cancer doctors decide what kind of treatment to administer to each patient. There are many options. There is no regular treatment option for pleural mesothelioma sufferers. This is due to the cancers high mortality rate, rareness, low treatment success rate, and small number of studies to provide meaningful statistics.
Mesothelioma patients have historically had a bleak outlook, but doctors have recently made progress. Customary treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and the tissue that surrounds it), chemotherapy (poisoning cancerous cells) and radiation (killing cancer cells with radiation) Each one of these methods have problems. Mesothelioma patients treated with traditional radiation therapy have not responded well to it. In hopes to lessen damage to healthy tissue, researches are studying ways to aim radiation right at the tumor.
The mesothelial tissue around the tumor is removed by surgery. It is a grueling surgery with unknown benefits to patients. The usual chemotherapy cocktails effective on other cancers are not effective on mesothelioma, and combinations of chemotherapy agents have been tried, but without much success. Like radiation, researchers are focusing their work on controlling the physical location of the treatment with an emphasis on the pleural cavity.
The death rate for mesothelioma is so high that many of even the most sophisticated techniques in cancer treatment are tried out on patients. Such treatments include anti-angiogenesis drugs like thalidomide and biologic therapies agent interleukin 2. Pemetrexed (Alimta) is a new drug that has shown results in extending life.
Oncologists consider the stage of mesothelioma, the location of the tumor, the patient’s age and state of health at the time. Two exotic ways of attacking mesothelioma are gene therapy and photodynamic therapy. Clinical trials using these techniques are being offered to some of those who have mesothelioma.
