(See also Treatment Decisions on this page).ĭifferent cancer cells, and the processes involved in the spread of cancer, respond to different drugs. They will advise on the benefits that can realistically be expected. It is a very personal decision that belongs to the patient but the decision should be made with advice and support from healthcare professionals.
The decision to have chemotherapy needs careful consideration. Where there are side effects of chemo treatments, such as nausea, the doctor will seek to reduce them with additional drugs such as steroids. The effect of the chemicals in the chemo depends on the dose but, as this website on making sense of chemicals argues, we shouldn’t be too hung-up about ingesting chemicals. The cancer doctor (oncologist) will be balancing the chemo’s toxicity with the potential benefit, and the ‘performance status’ of the patient (including his or her tolerance of the drugs). The drugs are unable to tell the difference between cancerous and healthy cells which is why, for example, some chemo treatments make the hair fall out or cause diarrhoea, (normal cells in the scalp and intestine have a high turnover).Īll chemotherapies have side effects and the side effects will affect different people in different ways. Chemo treatments work by targeting rapidly dividing cells to kill them or stop them spreading. The drugs are ‘cytotoxic’ meaning poisonous to living cells. Where they can, oncologists are increasingly using ‘targeted’ therapies aimed at specific cell proteins or signalling pathways targets inside cancer cells but because of the unspecific nature of CUP it may be necessary to use drugs that have multiple targets trying to interfere with more than one protein or signalling pathway in the cancer process.Ĭhemo is ‘systemic anti cancer therapy’ that is to say it affects the whole body. In the event that your treatment includes surgery, you may hear the terms Adjuvant chemotherapy (used after surgery to mop-up cells or Neoadjuvant chemotherapy (used before surgery to reduce the size of a tumour). It is the most common way of dealing with metastatic cancers like CUP cancers that have spread. Chemotherapy drugs are usually injected into the bloodstream, but sometimes taken by mouth, to try and cure or reduce cancer tumours.
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