There are two ways of administering breast chemotherapy: orally in cycles established by the doctor or intravenously. The drug reaches in the blood and then travels through the whole system to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. The targeted elements of breast chemotherapy are the cancer cells in the mammary glands, but there will be collateral damage to. From this point of view doctors call breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because its effects are extended to the entire body structure.

Breast chemotherapy may be recommended after mastectomy or lumpectomy and in this case it is known as adjuvant treatment. The patients undergo this type of treatment only when doctors are certain from analyses that cancer has not yet spread to any other parts of the body but the breast.

Another situation when breast chemotherapy represents a necessity is when cancer has spread to other parts of the body starting from the lymph nodes. This particular spread is known as metastatic breast cancer and women rarely have this form at the time of the diagnosis.

Is the breast chemotherapy treatment effective or not? Can one tell without a doctor's opinion? The efficiency of the treatment is not related to side effects: these adverse reactions appear whether the procedure works or not. This would be the wrong approach to it all. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy could show no side effects but the efficiency rate is often very positive in the sense that the spreading of the malevolent cells is stopped.

All in all, breast chemotherapy makes no easy treatment. It is probably the devastating treatment and the mutilation brought by breast cancer in itself that has increased awareness among women, making disease detection a lot easier and in the early stages of development.

Breast cancer Chemotherapy is a post from: Doctors Information - Alternative Medicine

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Radiotherapy or regular chemical-based treatments are included in the adjuvant chemotherapy category and they are recommended by the doctors based on some statistical evidence which is employed in order to figure out whether there is low or high risk in relapse for the patient. Statistics show that about a third of the patients who have received adjuvant chemotherapy treatment have already been completely cured with the help of the surgery alone. For those who are not included in the above mentioned third, the long term aim of the adjuvant chemotherapy is to lengthen the life of the cancer patients.

The types of cancer in which adjuvant chemotherapy is used are quite various and here we may include colon cancer, lung, pancreatic, breast and prostate cancer as well as some forms of gynecological cancers.

Beside the adjuvant chemotherapy, there is also another type of treatment that resembles the former in name; that is, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy. The neo-variant consists in the administration of drugs in the stage preceding the anti-cancer treatment per se. For instance, neo-adjuvant chemotherapy may be prescribed to a patient suffering from breast cancer who will have to undergo surgery for breast removal. The aim of such a type of therapy is to minimize the size of the tumor so that the surgery may be performed more efficiently and with less risk.

All in all, adjuvant chemotherapy has been identified as more effective when it is used in the aftermath of the operation rather than prior to it. The drugs specific to this type of treatment are most efficient when they are administered directly into the blood of the patient, that is, intravenously; another way of enhancing drug effects is to insert it directly into the part of the body that is affected by cancer.

Cancer help is a post from: Doctors Information - Alternative Medicine

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