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Medical Video: Breast Cancer Treatment
What is chemotherapy?
Cancer cells can grow and cannot be controlled. Chemotherapy is a therapy used to stop the growth of breast cancer cells in a way that controls it. However, chemotherapy can harm healthy cells in the body and can also cause side effects.
During chemotherapy treatment, patients may not feel the side effects but this rarely happens. The effects of chemotherapy depend on the type and dose received by the patient. In general, the effects experienced by patients include nausea, vomiting, pain and hair loss. Healthy cells will grow back after finishing chemotherapy.
The chemotherapy that the patient will undergo depends on the type of cancer, the medication that must be given, the purpose of the treatment, and the body's response to treatment. It may be that the patient has to do chemotherapy every day, every week or every month, the time spent depends on the need for treatment. However, patients can stop chemotherapy if the body forms new healthy cells.
How to do breast cancer chemotherapy?
Adjuvant therapy is a therapy given to patients if no cancer is found after surgery. Surgery is performed to remove the visible cancer while adjuvant therapy is given to kill cancer cells that have spread in the body but the cells cannot be seen. If cells that don't look continue to grow, these cells can form new tumors in other parts of the body.
Adjuvant therapy given after breast conservation surgery or a mastectomy is useful for reducing the risk of breast cancer coming back. Radiation, chemo, targeted therapy, and hormone therapy are also used in adjuvant treatment.
Treatment before surgery or neo-adjuvant therapy is a therapy similar to adjuvant therapy. Basically there is no difference between doing chemotherapy after or before surgery because cancer can survive and can still grow in the body. However, there are several advantages of neo-adjuvant, namely chemotherapy is able to reduce the size of the tumor so that the body part to be dissected is small. Neo-adjuvant is often used to treat cancer and cancer removal surgery. Doctors can also see cancer conditions if chemo is done first before surgical removal. If the drug administration is not able to reduce the size of the tumor, usually the doctor will know other drugs that can be used by the patient.
For advanced breast cancer, chemo can also be used as a treatment for women whose cancer has spread outside the breast and underarm area. The duration of treatment for advanced cancer depends on how much cancer can shrink and how much consideration the patient has to undergo treatment.
The purpose of drug use in chemotherapy is to weaken and destroy cancer cells in the body including tissue cancer cells that may have spread to other parts of the body. Chemotherapy often abbreviated as chemo is a system of treatment or therapy that can affect the entire body through the bloodstream.
There are several types of chemotherapy drugs used for cancer treatment. Usually chemotherapy drugs are a combination of two or more types of drugs.
Chemotherapy is used to treat:
- Early stage breast cancer. At this stage chemotherapy is useful for removing cancer cells left behind after surgery and also reduces the risk of cancer coming back
- Advanced breast cancer is useful for destroying as much cancer cells as possible in the patient's body.
Chemotherapy will be given before surgery so that the size of the cancer can shrink or shrink.
