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Colon Cancer Chemotherapy

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Chemotherapy Drug Information

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 colon cancer 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.

Colon Cancer Chemotherapy drugs are pretty numerous and they fall into various categories following such criteria as the way they work, the relationship they establish with other drugs and the chemical structure they have. The origin of most drugs is in herbal extracts that are afterwards processed and combined in laboratories. Don’t be surprised to find a drug classified in more categories, because there are many such cases in the medical world. Doctors have a very precise duty of getting fully informed about chemotherapy drugs and know how to combine them or in what order to prescribe them to cancer patients.

A chemotherapy drug, or better a combination of such drugs, functions by destroying cells that divide quickly. Unfortunately, these drugs cannot make a selection between normal fast-dividing body cells and cancer cells. These other cells that get attacked by a chemotherapy drug are digestive tract linings, the bone marrow and the hair follicles. 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 colon cancer chemotherapy drug and cytostatic chemotherapy agents there are the treatment of autoimmune diseases (multiple sclerosis, rheumatoid arthritis) and the suppression of transplant rejections. More modern cancer treatments known as targeted therapy use anti-cancer medication that attacks only the abnormal proteins in cancer cells.

Different classes of colon cancer 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 peculiar 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 colon cancer 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.