Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy

Chemotherapy is one of the cancer treatments and uses one or more anticancer drugs as a part of a chemotherapy regimen. It may be given with a curative intent that almost always involves the combinations of drugs, or it might aim to reduce symptoms or to prolong life. It is one of the major parts of the medical discipline that specifically devoted to the pharmacotherapy for cancer, called as medical oncology.

By common usage, chemotherapy has come to imply the use of rather non-specific intracellular poisons, particularly related to inhibiting the process of cell division called as mitosis. Generally, it also excludes the agents that are more selectively block extracellular growth signals. In order to avoid these connotations for recently developed therapies that inhibit of growth-promoting signals comes from the classic endocrine hormones especially androgens for prostate cancer and estrogens for breast cancer is known as hormonal therapy.

As the inhibition of other growth-promoting influences particularly those associated with receptor tyrosine kinases is called as targeted therapy.

Chemotherapy also uses anti-cancer drugs in order to destroy the cancer cells such as lymphoma, leukemia, and myeloma. Cytotoxic literally means toxic to cells.

The Cytotoxic chemotherapy drugs damage the way cancer cells grow however they also affect normal cells. Healthy cells can also usually repair the damage that is caused by chemotherapy however, cancer cells can’t and they eventually die.