Cancer Information

Posts Tagged ‘Treatment of Cancer’

Chemotherapy is one of the most commonly used therapeutic modalities in the treatment of cancer. Its aim is to destroy, using a variety of drugs, the cells that make up the tumor in order to achieve the reduction or elimination of the disease.

The drugs used in this treatment are called antineoplastic or chemotherapeutic drugs.These drugs reach almost all tissues of the body and that’s where they exert their action both on malignant cells and healthy ones. Due to the action of drugs on the latter may appear a series of more or less severe symptoms, known side effects.
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An antigen is a foreign substance recognized and marked by the body’s immune system to be destroyed. The antigens are found on the surface of all cells, but usually an individual’s immune system does not react against its own cells. When a cell becomes cancer, new antigens (unfamiliar to the immune system) appears on the surface of this cell and the immune system may consider these new antigens, called Tumor antigens as foreign and is able to stop or destroy these cells cancer. However, even fully operational, the immune system does not always destroy all the cancer cells.

Tumor antigens have been identified in several types of cancer, including malignant melanoma, bone cancer (osteosarcoma) and some types of gastrointestinal cancers. People with these cancers can develop antibodies against these tumor antigens, but antigens usually do not produce an adequate immune response to cancer control. In addition, antibodies may be incapable of destroying the cancer and sometimes even seems to stimulate their growth.
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