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Oncologists decide what type of treatment to pursue for every patient. There are numerous options. There exists no universal treatment course for pleural mesothelioma cancer victims. This is due to the cancers high mortality rate, rareness, low treatment success rate, and small number of studies to provide meaningful statistics.

The prospects for mesothelioma patients have been grim, 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) There are problems with all three. Patients with mesothelioma have not responded well to traditional radiation therapy. Researches, concerned about damage to healthy tissue, are looking for ways to aim radiation directly at tumors.

Surgery takes out the mesothelial cancerous tissue around the tumor. The surgery is difficult and challenging, with unknown effects or benefits to patients. Common chemotherapy drugs that work on other types of cancer usually do not work on mesothelioma, and different combinations of chemotherapy drugs have been tried without a lot of success. Like radiation, researchers are focusing their work on controlling the physical location of the treatment with an emphasis on the pleural cavity.

Many advanced techniques in cancer treatment are tried on mesothelioma patients because of its high fatality rate. These include biologic therapy such as the agent interleukin 2 and anti-angiogenesis drugs such as thalidomide. The new drug pemetrexed (brand name Alimta) has shown good results in extending life with mesotheliomas..

Before acting, oncologists review the stage of mesothelioma, position of the tumor, and age and health status of the patient. Two exotic ways of attacking mesothelioma are gene therapy and photodynamic therapy. Mesothelioma patients sometimes become involved in clinical trials in this area, and see benefits.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 7th, 2009 at 6:19 am and is filed under Better Health, Better Science Savvy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.