As a disease cancer consists of the uncontrolled malignant cellular growth, the invasion of organs and the metastasis. It seams that the cause of the condition is a combination of genetic predisposition and the exposure to some environmental toxins. Basically, the chemotherapy drug’s functioning principle is to impair cell division (mitosis), targeting rapidly-dividing cells. The fact that these drugs destroy cells leads to their being named cytotoxic.
Chemotherapy, generally speaking, implies the treatment of a disease by means of chemicals which kill the sick cells. In more particular terms, chemotherapy is used to kill the cells of micro-organisms or cancer. The most common chemotherapy drug regimen is made up from a combination of antineoplastic medication that represents the cytotoxic standardized treatment. Besides the reference to cancer treatment, chemotherapy also has an antibacterial dimension when it involves the use of antibiotics.
A chemotherapy drug, or better a combination of such drugs, functions on the principle of cellular destruction. Unfortunately, these drugs also affect/attack other healthy cells that divide rapidly. The collateral casualties produced by a chemotherapy drug are cells in the hair follicles, bone marrow and digestive tract. These results on the normal rapid-dividing cells are the side effects of chemotherapy: alopecia – hair loss, myelosuppression – decreased production of blood cells, and mucositis – inflammation of the digestive tract.
Among the other uses of the chemotherapy drug and cytostatic chemotherapy agents there are the treatment of autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis) and the suppression of transplant rejections. There are newer anti-cancer drugs which were designed to act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this treatment option is known as targeted therapy.
Different classes of chemotherapy drug medication are available at present. Most of the drugs can be divided into alkylating agents, antimetabolites, plant alkaloids, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines, and other antitumor agents. Some newer agents, like monoclonal antibodies and tyrosine kinase inhibitors, do not interfere directly with the DNA as do the above mentioned ones.
These ones target a molecular abnormality in particular types of cancer such as gastrointestinal stromal tumors or chronic myelogenous leukemia. Besides these, there is also the category of drugs that modulate the tumor cell behavior without directly attacking those cells. From these so-called adjuvant therapies, the hormone treatment will be commonly used. The decision to administer only one chemotherapy drug or a combination of several medicines belongs to the doctor and it is taken depending on the stage of the disease and the purpose of the treatment.
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