Cancer Treatment Types

 

Chemotherapy (Chemo)

This strong medication keeps cancer from spreading, makes it grow slower, or even kills cancer cells. It can cause side effects, because it kills cells in your body that grow quickly, including those in your blood, mouth, digestive system, and hair follicles. There are over 100 different types of chemo drugs. Your doctor will choose the one that’s best for your type of cancer. You may take it as a pill or capsule, rub it into your skin as a cream, or get it as an injection or IV at home or in the hospital.

External Beam Radiation

This treatment attacks cancer cells with high-energy particles (proton or particle therapy) or waves (X-rays). It kills or damages cells in one specific area instead of in your whole body, like chemotherapy. The most common type comes from a machine outside your body. It’s called external-beam radiation.

Internal Radiation

You’ll probably hear your doctor call it brachytherapy. He’ll put radioactive implants about the size of a grain of rice inside your body where the tumor is. The radiation kills the cancer cells. This treatment makes you radioactive for a while, so you may have to avoid other people until it’s finished.

Open Surgery

Treating cancer with surgery works best if you have a solid tumor in one area. It often can’t treat cancer that has spread, or cancer that’s in your blood, like leukemia. The surgeon makes a cut in your skin with a scalpel or other sharp tool and removes as much of the tumor as possible. She may also take out lymph nodes and other tissues for testing. This is called open surgery.

Minimally Invasive Surgery

The goal for this procedure is the same as open surgery -- to remove tumors, and also tissues and lymph nodes if needed. Instead of one large cut, the surgeon makes several small ones. She puts a tube with a tiny camera into one cut to see inside your body, and tools into the others. This is called laparoscopic surgery. It usually has a shorter recovery time than open surgery.

Other Surgeries

• Cryosurgery uses very cold nitrogen or argon gas to freeze off abnormal tissue. It can treat some early skin cancers, retinoblastoma, or precancerous spots on your skin or cervix. 

• Photodynamic therapy is a laparoscopic surgery that puts drugs near tumors. Light activates the medicine, and it kills cancer cells.

• Laser surgery uses strong beams of light to cut into your skin. It’s good for very tiny areas. Lasers can also sometimes shrink tumors.

Stem Cell Transplant

These are cells in your blood and bone marrow that haven’t matured, or grown into their final form. The doctor uses them to replace cells in your bone marrow that other treatments kill. That means you can get higher doses of those therapies. Sometimes, stem cells can find and kill cancer cells. You get stem cell treatment through a catheter, much like a blood transfusion.

Precision Medicine

This new field, also called personalized medicine, uses your genetic makeup and other things to find out the best treatment for your cancer. In the “one-size-fits-all” model, your doctor chooses the option that works best on most cancers like yours. Precision medicine helps take some of the guesswork out of the selection process. It isn’t used widely yet for all forms of the disease -- many people who get it are part of clinical trials.

Targeted Therapies

These are usually paired with other treatments. They’re strong medicine, like chemotherapy, but instead of killing all fast-growing cells, they home in on the parts of cancer cells that make them different from other cells. Targeted drugs do things like stop blood vessels from growing around cancer cells, or turn off signals that tell cancer cells to grow. They can also tell your immune system to destroy them, or change their proteins so they die.

Hormone Therapy

Also called endocrine therapy, it targets cancers that use hormones to grow. There are two kinds: those that stop you from making hormones, and those that keep hormones from working the way they should. You can either take them as pills or get them through a shot. Sometimes you may need surgery to remove an organ that makes hormones, like ovaries or testicles. Doctors use hormone therapy with other methods to shrink tumors before surgery or treatment, or to kill cancer cells that have spread to other parts of your body.  It can also lower the chances that your cancer will return.

Gene Therapy

This treatment uses a special carrier, usually a virus, to put RNA or DNA into your living cells. Your doctor will either remove some of your cells and put the genetic materials into them in a lab or give you the carrier directly. The changed cells then either kill cancer cells, slow their growth, or help healthy cells fight cancer better. Doctors don’t use this method widely yet -- it’s still in clinical trials.

Immunotherapy

This type of biological therapy, or biotherapy, uses your own immune system to fight the cancer. It either boosts your immune system or marks cancer cells so your immune system can see and destroy them more easily. You get it by mouth as a pill, into a vein as an IV, by rubbing a cream into your skin, or through a catheter directly into your bladder.

Types of Immunotherapy

• Immune checkpoint inhibitors are drugs that take the brakes off your immune system to help it find and attack cancer cells.

• Cancer vaccines start an immune response against cancer cells so your body can better attack them. They can also prevent certain cancers.

• Monoclonal antibodies are drugs made in a lab to work like your natural antibodies. They mark cancer cells as the ones your immune system should attack. They can also help chemotherapy and radiation go directly to cancer cells. 

Adoptive Cell Transfer (ACT)

This is another type of immunotherapy, but it also involves gene therapy. Doctors take immune cells from your blood and add genes to change them so they can better spot and kill cancer cells. Then they grow lots of these cells in a lab and put them back into your body. So far, the only kind of ACT approved by the FDA is called CAR T-cell therapy. It may be an option for kids and young adults who have a type of blood cancer called acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) that hasn’t responded to other treatments.

Risks and Benefits of Immunotherapy

If your doctor suggests immunotherapy to fight your cancer, you may have lots of questions. This type of treatment is new, but there are questions you can ask to decide if it’s right for you and know what you can expect if you try it.

What Is Immunotherapy?

Your immune system is made up of white blood cells, plus the organs and tissues of your lymph system -- like your bone marrow. Its main job is to help your body fight off disease and stay healthy.
Unlike other cancer treatments, immunotherapy drugs don’t kill cancer cells. Instead, they help your immune system do the job. They might help it work harder or make it easier for it to find and get rid of cancer cells.

You get immunotherapy in different ways. It could come through an IV into your vein, as a pill you swallow, or a cream you rub into your skin. Sometimes the doctor will put it straight into your bladder.

Cancers that can be treated with immunotherapy include:

• Bladder
• Brain
• Breast
• Cervical
• Colorectal
• Gastric
• Kidney
• Lymphoma/Leukemia
• Lung
• Melanoma
• Ovarian
• Prostate

What Are the Benefits?

There are many reasons why your doctor might think immunotherapy’s a good choice for you:

Immunotherapy may work when other treatments don’t. Some cancers (like skin cancer) don’t respond well to radiation or chemotherapy but start to go away after immunotherapy.

It can help other cancer treatments work better. Other therapies you have, like chemotherapy, may work better when you also have immunotherapy.

It causes fewer side effects than other treatments. That’s because it targets just your immune system instead of all the cells in your body. The most common side effects are flu-like symptoms, fever, fatigue, rash, and feeling dizzy. Most of the time, these ease up after your first treatment.

Your cancer may be less likely to return.  When you have immunotherapy, your immune system learns to go after cancer cells if they ever come back. This is called immunomemory, and it could help you stay cancer-free for a longer time.

What Are the Risks?

Immunotherapy holds a lot of promise as a cancer treatment. Still, it isn’t perfect:

You might have a bad reaction: It could hurt, itch swell, turn red, or get sore at the place where the medication goes into your body.

There are side effects, just like any other medication. Some types of immunotherapy amp up your immune system and make you feel like you have the flu, complete with fever, chills, and fatigue. Others could cause problems like swelling, weight gain from extra fluids, heart palpitations, a stuffy head, and diarrhea. They could make you more likely to get an infection. Or they could affect your nerves or raise your chance of having blood clots.

It can harm organs and systems. Some of these drugs can cause your immune system to attack organs like your heart, liver, lungs, kidneys, or intestines.

It isn’t a quick fix. Immunotherapy takes longer to work than other common treatments. Your cancer won’t go away quickly.

Not everyone responds. Right now, immunotherapy works for less than half the people who try it. Many people only have a partial response. This means that your tumor could stop growing or get smaller, but won’t go away. Doctors aren’t sure yet why immunotherapy helps only some people.

Your body could get used to it. Over time, immunotherapy may stop having an effect on your cancer cells. This means that even if you have a good response at first, your tumor could start to grow again.

Ask your doctor if immunotherapy is the best way to treat your cancer. Find out which type of drug she has in mind and what her goal is for your treatment.

So far, only a few immunotherapy drugs are approved to fight cancer. Hundreds more are being tested in clinical trials. These are research studies that use volunteers to test new medicines not yet sold to the public.

If immunotherapy seems like the best way to fight your cancer, your doctor may know of a trial you can join.

 

Source Link: https://www.webmd.com/cancer/immunotherapy-approach-17/slideshow-cancer-treatments