Mesothelioma Cancer Treatment
Mesothelioma treatment usually includes combinations of therapies that might include surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Depending on risk factors and the stage to which the tumor has progressed, different courses of treatment may be prescribed for different patients. Some treatment might only be palliative to ease pain and improve quality of life for the sufferer. If the mesothelioma is diagnosed soon enough, other treatment might attempt to remove and eliminate the cancer from the patient.
Factors Affecting Treatment
Many factors affect treatment plans for those diagnosed with mesothelioma. The location of the mesothelioma tumor, which may be in the lungs, abdomen, heart and rarely the testicles, may affect the treatment plan. Other factors influencing treatment include the age of the patient, which typically sees better prognosis for younger patients, and the overall health of the patient. Most importantly, a doctor will categorize the spread of mesothelioma in one of four stages. If a patient is diagnosed with stage one or stage two mesothelioma, meaning that the cancer is relatively localized and has minimally affected other organs, the chances of survival are greater and a treatment seeking to cure the patient is typically prescribed. However, a stage three or stage four diagnosis has an unfortunately negative diagnosis and the survival rates are very low for these patients.
Curative Treatment
Curative treatment seeks to rid a patient's body of the cancer cells causing and spreading mesothelioma. Although long-term survival rates are unfortunately low at 10 percent for five years as an average of all mesothelioma diagnoses, there are notable exceptions in which patients have lived upwards of 20 years after a diagnosis. Usually, those patients that undergo curative treatment and have the greatest success rates are those that are younger, in overall good health and have been diagnosed early with stage one or stage two.
A curative treatment regimen usually entails a combination of surgery, radiation therapy and chemotherapy. Surgical treatment is intended to physically remove as much of the tumor and cancerous cells as possible from a patient. This surgery is typically followed by radiation therapy and chemotherapy, which attempt to kill the cancer cells with X-rays and prescriptive drugs, respectively. Although each therapy plays an important role in treatment, studies have shown that they work best in combination and have shown minimal success by themselves.
Palliative Treatment
Sometimes, by the time a patient is diagnosed with mesothelioma, it has unfortunately spread too far and affected far too many organs for a curative treatment to be effective. Other times, curative treatment may fail and a patient may opt to move toward a course of palliative treatment. Palliative treatment describes medical options which help improve the quality of life and ease the pain of patients without attempting to cure the disease. An example of palliative treatment might include a minor surgery to drain fluid around the lungs to ease chest pain and breathing.
Patients should always seek a doctor's advice on the best treatment plan for their particular set of conditions.