Nationwide shortages of two dozen chemotherapy drugs are leading to rationing and delays in treatment for cancer patients, local and national authorities say.
May 22, 2023
0
4
Women experience menopause at different ages—and different ways—which can, among other things, affect their heart health.
May 19, 2023
0
19
A new international study published in Nature Medicine and presented as a late-breaking abstract at the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) annual conference, shows great promise for patients with glioblastoma.
May 15, 2023
1
76
Gastric cancer is the fifth most commonly diagnosed malignancy worldwide. It ranks a sad third in cancer-related causes of death. The reason for this is late diagnosis coupled with rapid spread of tumor cells in the body.
May 8, 2023
0
29
A recent clinical trial showed that the drug combination of cemiplimab plus platinum chemotherapy can prolong survival in patients with advanced lung cancer when compared with placebo plus platinum chemotherapy. Now an analysis ...
May 8, 2023
0
11
An innovative cancer drug discovered by scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, is set to enter a new clinical trial.
May 5, 2023
0
3
Immunotherapy with blinatumomab leads to a strongly improved survival rate—from 66% to 93%—for children with an aggressive form of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL). They also had fewer side effects from the treatment. ...
Apr 26, 2023
0
51
Should patients over the age of 70 with head and neck cancer receive aggressive combined radiotherapy and chemotherapy? This is a controversial issue among patients, their families and health professionals. A large-scale ...
Apr 26, 2023
0
6
Homologous Recombination Deficiency (HRD) is a biomarker that predicts ovarian cancer treatment with PARP inhibitors or breast cancer treatment with first-line platinum-based chemotherapy. However, limited research is documented ...
Apr 25, 2023
0
5
For people with cancer, chemotherapy saves lives, but for some patients, the treatment comes with a side effect—heart damage. Screening cancer drugs for cardiotoxicity has been an ongoing challenge, as heart cells don't ...
Apr 20, 2023
0
16
Chemotherapy, in its most general sense, refers to treatment of disease by chemicals that kill cells, both good and bad, but specifically those of micro-organisms or cancerous tumours. In popular usage, it refers to antineoplastic drugs used to treat cancer or the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. In its non-oncological use, the term may also refer to antibiotics (antibacterial chemotherapy). In that sense, the first modern chemotherapeutic agent was Paul Ehrlich's arsphenamine, an arsenic compound discovered in 1909 and used to treat syphilis. This was later followed by sulfonamides discovered by Domagk and penicillin discovered by Alexander Fleming.
Most commonly, chemotherapy acts by killing cells that divide rapidly, one of the main properties of cancer cells. This means that it also harms cells that divide rapidly under normal circumstances: cells in the bone marrow, digestive tract and hair follicles; this results in the most common side effects of chemotherapy—myelosuppression (decreased production of blood cells), mucositis (inflammation of the lining of the digestive tract) and alopecia (hair loss).
Other uses of cytostatic chemotherapy agents (including the ones mentioned below) are the treatment of autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis and rheumatoid arthritis and the suppression of transplant rejections (see immunosuppression and DMARDs). Newer anticancer drugs act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this is termed targeted therapy.
This text uses material from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA
