Combination In Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is the use of certain drugs to treat cancer. Doctors will choose drugs depending on the type of cancer diagnosis. For example, chemotherapy is used to treat breast cancer. (“How is”). There are many side effects of chemotherapy. A few are; anemia, appetite loss, memory loss, bleeding, clotting,

The first study on oncology nurses and risks of chemotherapy exposure where done in the late 1970s when mutagenic changes were discovered in the urine of nurses who administered chemotherapy. The first set of guidelines for the safe handling of chemotherapy was made around

According to the oral cancer foundation, “Chemotherapy is the use of chemicals to destroy cancer cells. Chemotherapy works by interfering with the cancer cell's ability to grow. It is one of the three main methods utilized to treat cancer.” With cancer being a potentially fatal disease it is important to diagnose it as soon as possible. the oncologist have to study the chemicals used so that they can determine what chemicals will treat the cancer or disease the best and what chemicals can be mixed together without any major side effects. The drugs can be divided into groups based on how they work, their chemical structure, and their relationship to other drugs.

There are different types of chemotherapy induced peripheral neuropathy: sensory neuropathy, motor neuropathy, and autonomic neuropathy. Sensory neuropathy is what most would think of when discussing neuropathic symptoms. This includes the feelings of numbness and tingling that can lead to burning sensations. Many describe this feeling as “pins and needles”. Motor neuropathy is related to feelings of muscles weakness and loss of control, which can lead to decreased coordination. Finally, autonomic neuropathy presents itself with symptoms of abdominal

Chemotherapy is the administration of chemicals into the body in an attempt to cure/lessen the severity of cancer in living organisms. Chemotherapy is always given with a curative intent, but that cannot always be promised to the patient, so sometimes it is given to relieve symptoms that the patients are experiencing or to improve their overall quality of life.1 While chemotherapy is used as an agent to try to rid individuals of their cancer, it is essentially slowly killing them. The chemicals used for the treatment are toxic to the human body and while they are giving them in small amounts, those small amounts accumulate over time to large amounts in the body. The body is affected by the treatment in various different ways and every body

While visions of losing your hair and being sick all the time can be a shocking reality, this is very often not the reality of cancer patients. The field has evolved greatly over the years. Today many people in chemotherapy lead full and active lives.

There are so many risks associated with the use of chemotherapy drugs to treat cancer. The major reason for this is that, chemotherapy drugs works on both normal cells and cancer cells. Therefore, while killing cancer cells, it kills normal cells as well. Additional risk can arise from overdose, extravasation (when an injected drug finds its way from the intended vessel to surrounding tissues) from cancer injections and serious damage to important organs of the body. Thankfully, drugs like Totect (Dexrazoxane Hydrochloride) have been developed to combat the effects of any risk that manifest in patients while undergoing chemotherapy.

Neutropenia happens the majority of the patients with cancer who are receiving chemotherapy treatment. Also, it is a common side effect in the patients with a type of cancer called leukemia.

Chemotherapy is most recognizable from its uses in the medical to help people who sadly have cancer. To begin, chemotherapy has saved people lives and defiantly given dejected cancer patients some confidence in their fight. There are many different forms of chemotherapy to treat a wide arrange of patients. They might be different but these horrific chemicals that are being consumed have one goal. These chemicals simply have the goal of entering the body to kill healthy or mutated cells. This primarily where the harsh side effects come into play as the chemicals will kill anything in its path working cell or mutated cell it has no agenda. Chemicals can be entered into your body in a number of different ways such as orally, injections and even creams. Many doctors make specific plans or certain types of cancer if a certain strategy has worked on an earlier patient.

Cancer unlike other illnesses is very unique in the fact we have to accept a certain level of toxicity well above that of any other group of pharmacologic agents. It is the toxicity of these agents which is the single most important factor preventing their use in doses that could often be curative. Ultimately the utility of most chemotherapy drugs depends on their therapeutic-to-toxic ratio, comparing the good and bad effects (Alwood et al, 1997). Other variables include the severity, predictability and reversibility of side effects. Although we are learning a lot more about the predictive side effects of many individual cancer drugs, most cancer patients require multi-drug therapies. Cancer patients often have chemotherapy regimens consisting of three or four different compounds along with other supportive therapy.

Chemotherapy is done to either cure cancer or to prolong life. The chemotherapeutic agents used in this process, acts by targeting cancer cells. In this process, they also harm the normal cells in the patient’s body, leading to adverse health effects. Most of the conventional chemotherapeutic agents available today, do not have the expected specificity, and can end up harming normal cells to varying

[23] and Doyle et al. [53]. We applied the results of the former study to the model, because it was more relevant in terms of health states. The study derived utilities in health states of NSCLC IIIb and IV and disutilities in grade III-IV toxicities under the situation where metastatic NSCLC patients received second-line chemotherapy. Only, we recited disutility in anemia from Westwood et al. [14]. We assumed that adverse events occurred during the first cycle, and adverse event rates relied on the type of treatment regimen regardless of the first-line or the second-line treatment. Finally, in case of an oral medication, 0.02 obtained from Tabberer et al. [24] was added to the utilities investigated by Nafees et al., because the study was carried out under the situation on intravenous treatments such as pemetrexed or

Chemotherapy can increase a patient’s life span and improve the outcome of cancer treatment. However, the side effects of nausea and vomiting can be debilitating to the patient’s quality of life. According to Navari, (2013), specific patients’ characteristics and the type of chemotherapy administered can increase the risk of chemotherapy induced nausea and vomiting. For example history of motion sickness and pregnancy induced nausea and vomiting increases a patient’s risk, women are more at risk than men and in younger patients whilst patients with high alcohol consumption experiences less risk (NCCN, 2011).

The treatment plan for our patient that the doctor has chosen is chemotherapy. Chemotherapy includes the use of anticancer drugs in combination, generally over a couple of years (Movva, 2015). The drugs will be taken in either by mouth or by IV. The treatment plan should last about a month for our patient. There will be many side effects from the chemotherapy. Possible side effects include hair loss, nausea and vomiting, and increased risk for infection or bleeding in the short term, as well as other potential health problems later (Ben-Joseph, 2014). Doctors will keep record of side effects in order to treat patient with extra care if needed.

ADVERSE EFFECTS - Myelosuppression, nausea, vomiting, elevated increased alkaline phosphatase, proteinuria, fever, haematuria, rash, dyspnoea, edema, flu-like symptoms, infection, alopecia, neurotoxicity, renal or liver failure, haemolytic uremic syndrome, capillary leak syndrome, and posterior reversible encephalopathy syndrome.