Chemotherapy or what most people abbreviate as “chemo” is the use of multiple chemicals with anti-cancer properties with the important goal of having chemotherapy drugs work to suppress the division of many types of cancer cells that are dividing rapidly and continuously to prevent cells from continuing to divide and to eventually die.
What is the purpose of chemotherapy?
- Its benefit is to cure cancer patients and prevent recurrence. Certain curable types of cancer require many years of patient monitoring to be able to conclude that a patient is fully cured from cancer, including leukemia, lymphomas and breast cancer, etc.
- In incurable cancer, it can help control the disease to decrease the size of cancerous tumors or prevent them from growing and spreading to other organs, thus improving patient quality of life.
- It alleviates symptoms of malignant cancer. Some types of cancer require chemotherapy alongside radiotherapy or surgery. Accordingly, chemotherapy includes both neoadjuvant chemotherapy and adjuvant chemotherapy.
What is chemotherapy like?
There are many types of chemotherapy. For the most part, it includes drug injection by dripping into the body along with an intravenous solution. Oral chemotherapy drugs make it easier to manage medications while reducing chemotherapy administering time in the hospital setting. That being said, other types of chemotherapy are uncommon, including arterial chemotherapy, chemotherapy via the spinal cavity where spinal fluid is present for liver cancer in order to deal with cancer that has spread to the meninges and spinal cord.
Why are there break periods for chemotherapy?
Some body cells divide continuously such as red blood cells, skin cells, stomach lining tissue and hair cells. Therefore, the destruction of cancer cells by chemotherapy can damage the normal body cells that are dividing. In general, however, the number of normal body cells can recovery after pausing chemotherapy temporarily. Thus, it is necessary to pause chemotherapy to allow the body to recover from the side effects of drugs, and chemotherapy drug formulas have been developed to be administered periodically. As for physical recovery after chemotherapy, the side effects of chemotherapy may vary depending on each person and the type and dosage of chemotherapy drugs administered, as well as the patient’s physical condition before chemotherapy and the type and stage of cancer. Accordingly, it was found that the most common side effects in most patients was fatigue, which could occur 3-7 days after chemotherapy. In any case, if a patient has recovered from fatigue symptoms and the side effects of chemotherapy, the patient can return to work and perform responsibilities as normal.
There are many different chemotherapy formulas today. Although the duration for administering drugs may vary even in the same type of cancer, after undergoing chemotherapy for about 10-14 days, most patients will have low white blood cell count as a result of chemotherapy. Thus, patients have to be careful about infections and try to avoid places with poor air ventilation, in addition to avoiding outdoor work.
What are the common side effects?
Fatigue, nausea, vomiting, physical aches, hair loss, infection, anemia, low white blood cell count, sores in the oral cavity, constipation and diarrhea. Nevertheless, new chemotherapy drugs today produce fairly few side effects and guidelines have been developed to use drugs to prevent and manage side effects effectively, for example, drugs to prevent nausea and vomiting from chemotherapy.
Therefore, if you require chemotherapy, you should request for detailed information from your doctors in order to be able to deal with potential side effects.
