Cancer refers to the uncontrolled growth of cells combined with malignant behavior ? invasion and 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 functional principle is to impair cell division (mitosis), targeting rapidly-dividing cells. The damage they produce among cells, gives chemotherapy drugs the name of cytotoxic medication.
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. Chemotherapy usually refers to antineoplastic drugs which are used to treat cancer or to the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. Besides the reference to cancer treatment, chemotherapy drug also has an antibacterial dimension when it involves the use of antibiotics.
The pharmaceutical industry has come up with lots of chemotherapy drugs classified according to the chemical structure, the working principle and the possible associations with other medication. Most drugs are based on chemicals obtained from plants and this very origin or source leaves room to further classification. 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 the drug cocktail established by the doctor, functions on the principle of cellular destruction. Unfortunately, these drugs also affect/attack other healthy cells that divide rapidly. These other cells that get attacked by a chemotherapy drug are cells in the hair follicles, bone marrow and digestive tract. Thus, the main side effects of chemotherapy will include hair loss, the inflammation of the digestive tract and the reduced production of blood cells.
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. Thus there are antimetabolites, alkylating agents, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines and several others. While all these chemicals interfere with the DNA structure, there are newer and revolutionary medicines like the tyrosine kinase inhibitors or the monoclonal antibodies that leave the nucleic acids unaffected.
Such modern drugs target a molecular abnormality in peculiar types of cancer such as chronic myelogenous leukemia or gastrointestinal stromal tumors. More special chemotherapy drug options only change the behavior of the tumor cells without affecting other tissues. Within these adjuvant therapies the option very commonly used is the hormone treatment.
Depending on the stage of the disease and the aim of the treatment, doctors will choose to administer one chemotherapy drug or a combination of drugs according to one or another of the existing strategies.
Find out more chemotherapy drugs with chemotherapy drug information.
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