Adjuvant Chemotherapy

Cancer patients may have no other choice but to resort to chemotherapy in order to treat their illness. In oncology, adjuvant chemotherapy will have quite a special role for the patient because it is related to other cancer treatments. Adjuvant chemotherapy is an additional treatment given to the patient after surgery to help prevent any cancerous cells that may have not been completely removed during surgery from developing or increasing in number. The patient may relapse even if surgery has been performed because unfortunately, medicine is not sufficiently developed to be able to foresee whether cancer cells will reoccur or not.

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 purpose 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 latter is given to patients before the primary treatment and it may take the form of chemical drug-based treatment. For example, 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 prescribed after the tumor removal rather than before it because the remaining cancer cells are fewer in number and, as a result, the drug is more powerful on them. 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 increasing drug efficiency is to insert it directly into the part of the body that is affected by cancer.