Melanoma Chemotherapy

How I survived melanoma skin cancer and how YOU can too. Even if you are at stage 4!
Melanoma is a type of cancer that affects the skin and is recognized by the dark spots that appear on the dermis. In order to treat melanoma, diagnostic tests must first be completed and then the cancer team will be able to recommend one or maybe more treatment options. Melanoma chemotherapy is one of the possibilities here. Anyway, patients should consider these treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. First of all, patients ought to understand everything about the treatments. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.

Among the treatments for melanoma there are options like surgery and chemotherapy. 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 that is normally involved in the procedure uses injectable anticancer drugs.

These are usually injected into a vein or taken orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs travel through the bloodstream to all parts of the body. They attack cancer cells which have already spread beyond the skin to lymph nodes or other organs. The drugs kill cancer cells but, unfortunately they also destroy some normal cells as well. 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. As a result, patients will go through temporary side effects like nausea and vomiting, mouth sores, loss of appetite and loss of hair.

Melanoma chemotherapy drugs include temozolomide, cisplatin, vinblastine, DTIC, BCNU and tamoxifen. DTIC can be used alone or with other chemotherapy drugs like BCNU and cisplatin. The above three combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, bear the name Dartmouth Regimen. Then there is another combination of DTIC, cisplatin and vinblastine to use against melanoma. Temozolomide is a newer medicine, whose mode of function is similar to that of DTIC, except that it is used in the form of a pill.

Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs kill normal blood cells as well, patients might experience low blood cell counts and this can lead to bleeding or bruising after even minor cuts or injuries; excessive tiredness (frequently because of low red blood cell counts but also because of chemotherapy itself) and an increased chance of infection (because of white blood cell shortage).