Cancer treatments

There are 100 and 3000 marketed drugs are under research and development

To fight cancer, medical oncology has currently multiple therapeutic arms. Two of them, surgery and radiotherapy, act locally and are mainly used in early stages of the disease and another, chemotherapy acts systemically and is mainly used when the disease is widespread. The treatment used may be different for each cancer depends on many factors including the type of tumor, the location and extent of the disease and the patient's health status. However, more and more they combined treatments between these three methods to fight cancer are used.

• Radiation therapy is the use of radiation to kill cancer by damaging them with high energy rays cells.• Chemotherapy: The term refers to a variety of drugs used to treat cancer. These drugs work by damaging cancer cells prevents their division. However, all drugs used to treat cancer are not cytostatic, and so we have also:• hormonal drugs, since some tumors maintain a dependency on hormones for their growth.• antidiana drugs that work by blocking these molecules needed for the tumor to grow.• Vaccines whose purpose is to stimulate the body's defenses to act against cancer. Currently, over 100 are marketed drugs for treating cancer and the number of drugs that are currently under research and development is about 3,000. Unfortunately, chemotherapy does not only acts on the cancer cell, but also attacks those normal cells that are in the process of cell division, so a number of undesirable side effects that may affect, to varying degrees, to occur all organs. Among them, the most common are nausea and vomiting, alopecia, blood disorders, mucositis, diarrhea, neurological disorders, heart failure, lung or liver, infertility, etc.. Fortunately, these effects do not occur in all cases and are not always serious. In addition, most side effects can be prevented with treatment, they are reversible and usually recover quickly.