What is maintenance chemotherapy?

When a cancer patient responds well to chemotherapy, it may be able to stop taking anti -cancer drugs. Sometimes, however, the physician recommends to continue low levels of more chemotherapeutic drugs for a certain period of time after cancer has moved into remission. This type of treatment aimed at preventing the return of cancer is called maintenance chemotherapy. Since chemotherapy differs, maintenance chemotherapy does not seem to be beneficial for all cancer patients, and instead can affect the quality of life and expose patients unnecessary risks. Maintenance chemotherapy seems to be not effective for many cancer, but specific forms of leukemia respond best. Chemotherapy

describes the regime of drugs that can potentially treat and even reverse cancer growth. There are different forms of chemotherapy and all have side effects. They range from unpleasant, such as vomiting and hair loss, dangerous, as an increased risk of infection. More than more effects, many cancer patients are glad that despiteTane to take chemotherapy when their cancer goes into remission.

early versions of chemotherapy were more toxic and had more serious side effects than some of the latest versions. The traditional approach to chemotherapy was that once the patient's cancer went into remission, he could stop taking drugs and return to normal quality of life. Since newer drugs are less risk for health and quality of life than the older version, the potential risk to the patient may be less, and therefore the patient may be more accessible to maintain chemotherapy.

Although newer drugs are more tolerated than older medicines, the concept of maintenance therapy is not suitable for many cancer. This is because researching the effectiveness of using long medicines after initial successful chemotherapy says Doctory, which in most cases maintenance therapy does not prevent cancer return. Most of the cancer seems to fall into this group where pAcients will not gain any benefit from maintenance chemotherapy.

acute lymphocytic leukemia and acute promyelocytic leukemia are the exception of the rules. People with one of these cancers can reduce their chance of returning cancer if they use maintenance drugs. Research results show that therapy helps people live longer and has a longer period of remission than people who do not use maintenance.

Evidence in favor of maintenance therapy for other cancer, since 2011, does not indicate that therapy is useful to patients in general. However, the problem with cancer treatment is that individual people have different biological reactions to cancer and result in different reactions to treatment. Therefore, research is underway in which people need maintenance drugs and to which people will not respond to treatment.