The Usual Courses of Treatment Offer Little Chance for Mesothelioma
Doctors who specialize in cancer treatment determine what type of treatment to prescribe to each patient. The options are endless. There is no one size fits all treatment regimen for peritoneal mesothelioma sufferers. This is due to the cancers high mortality rate, rareness, low treatment success rate, and small number of studies to provide meaningful statistics.
While prospects for patients with mesothelioma have been bleak, doctors have been making progress. Customary treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and the tissue that surrounds it), radiation (killing the cancerous cells with radiation), and chemotherapy (poisoning the cancerous cells.) All three methods have problems. Traditional radiation therapy has not worked well with mesothelioma patients. Researchers are looking for ways of aiming radiation directly at the tumor in hopes that this will result in less damage to healthy tissue.
Surgery removes the mesothelial tissue around the tumor. It is a grueling surgery with unknown benefits to patients. Common chemotherapy drugs that work on other types of cancer usually do not work on mesothelioma, and combinations of chemotherapy agents have been tried, but without much success. As with radiation, research is going toward controlling the physical location of the treatment with emphasis on the pleural cavity.
Many advanced techniques in cancer treatment are tried on mesothelioma patients because of its high fatality rate. These techniques include a biologic therapy called the agent interleukin 2 and anti-angiogenesis drugs like thalidomide. The new drug pemetrexed (brand name Alimta) has shown good results in extending life with mesotheliomas..
Oncologists consider the stage of mesothelioma, the location of the tumor, the patient’s age and state of health at the time. Two exotic ways of attacking mesothelioma are gene therapy and photodynamic therapy. Clinical trials using these techniques are being offered to some of those who have mesothelioma.
