All You Need to Understand about Melanoma Chemotherapy

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 represents a first option to fight skin cancer. Anyway, patients should consider these treatment variants extensively by learning all the can on the implications. Proper information on the alternative treatments is the first step. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.

Surgery and melanoma chemotherapy represent the main alternatives here. The diversity of choices increases when it comes to determining the most advantageous form of surgery for the evolution and the location of the melanoma. 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 the procedure involves relies on 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. Consequently, all sorts of side effects will become manifest from mouth sores, nausea and vomiting to hair loss, anemia and many others.

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. DTIC, BCNU and cisplatin combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal medication commonly used breast cancer treatment, are known as the Dartmouth Regimen. Then melanoma is also treated by a combination of vinblastine, cisplastin and DTIC. To give one other melanoma chemotherapy drug example, we ought to refer to temozolomide, a modern medication administered orally.

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, fatigue (experienced because of the anemia and the medical treatment in itself) and an increased infection risk (because the number of blood cells drops tool).

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