All You Must Know about Melanoma Chemotherapy

Melanoma is a type of cancer that affects the skin and is recognized by the dark spots that appear on the dermis. These skin surface formations do not represent the only symptoms of the disease, more conclusive tests are performed before passing the initial cancer diagnosis and establishing a potential treatment. Melanoma chemotherapy is one of the possibilities here. Anyway, patients should analyze all treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. First of all, patients ought to understand everything about the treatments. The procedure will normally be established depending on the disease evolution and the thickness of the primary tumor.

Surgery and melanoma chemotherapy represent the main alternatives here. There are different choices in as far as surgery is concerned, depending on where and how advanced the melanoma is. Thus doctors might consider re-excision, amputation or lymph node dissection. If melanoma has spread from the skin to distant organs, then surgery will not be a curable option to use. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy might be the solution. Systemic chemotherapy involved in such procedures normally relies on injectable anticancer drugs.

These are usually injected into a vein or taken orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs get carried to all the body parts by blood. The direct impact of the active substances will be on the cancer cells affecting skin, organs and lymph nodes. The same medication that kills the tumor will also damage some healthy tissues too. Among these normal cells that can be killed are blood-producing cells of the bone marrow, cells that line the gastrointestinal tract and cells of hair follicles. Consequently, all sorts of side effects will become manifest from mouth sores, nausea and vomiting to hair loss, anemia and many others.

Among the melanoma chemotherapy drugs we ought to mention temozolomide, cisplastin, DTIC, tamoxifen, vinblastine and BCNU. Combinations between these various medications are possible and often recommended. DTIC, BCNU and cisplatin combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, are known as the Dartmouth Regimen. Then melanoma is also treated by a combination of vinblastine, cisplastin and DTIC. To give one other melanoma chemotherapy drug example, we ought to refer to temozolomide, a modern medication administered orally.

Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs kill normal blood cells as well, anemia would be certainly diagnosed and this can reduce the blood clotting speed for instance, excessive tiredness (frequently because of low red blood cell counts but also because of chemotherapy itself) and an increased infection risk (because of white blood cell shortage).

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