Breast chemotherapy is the cancer treatment used when the disease has attacked the mammary glands. Its purpose is to kill or to reduce in size the tumor consisting of cells that multiply very quickly compared to the normal rate of multiplication of normal cells. Breast chemotherapy can be of very many kinds depending on the combination of drugs that the doctor has selected for you. Correct information on the way the medication works as well as an analysis of the side effects and the optimistic evaluation factors ought to be part of the discussion between doctor and patient that precedes the treatment as such.

Breast chemotherapy is administered either orally or intravenously and it is usually given in cycles. The drug reaches in the blood and then travels through the entire body to locate and attack the sick cells meant to be destroyed. Even though breast chemotherapy is directed at breast cancer, the drugs that are recommended as treatment may act on whatever other unhealthy cells that may have already developed somewhere else than the breast. From this point of view doctors call breast chemotherapy a systemic treatment precisely because it may act all throughout the patient’s organism.

Breast chemotherapy is often prescribed after mastectomy or lumpectomy and in these conditions it is referred to as adjuvant therapy. The treatment is possible in this form only when medical tests indicate that the cancer is limited to the breast area only.

Another case when breast chemotherapy represents a necessity is when cancer has passed to other parts of the body starting from the lymph nodes. This particular spread is known as metastatic breast cancer and women rarely have this form at the time of the diagnosis.

Whichever of the breast chemotherapy treatments you are to receive it is important to know how you can figure out if it has any effect. The efficiency of the treatment is not related to side effects: these adverse reactions appear whether the procedure works or not. This would be the wrong approach to it all. Adjuvant breast chemotherapy could show no side effects but the efficiency rate is often very positive in the sense that the spreading of the malevolent cells is stopped.

All in all, breast chemotherapy makes no easy treatment. It is probably the devastating treatment and the mutilation brought by breast cancer in itself that has increased awareness among women, making disease detection a lot easier and in the early stages of development.

Lee writes about several health topics, including Acupuncture for Arthritis.

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Filed under: Cancer

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