Mesothelioma Treatment Option

Choosing the Best Mesothelioma Treatment Option

Are you searching for a new and effective mesothelioma treatment option? There are several types of mesothelioma treatment options available for patients suffering with mesothelioma. Most often recommended are surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation. Although these are the most common, there are other treatments that are becoming more frequently used, most of which are still experimental. Some of the more popular additional treatments are gene therapy, immunotherapy, and photodynamic therapy. Determining which mesothelioma treatment option is best for you will require learning about the various current treatments offered.

A cure for mesothelioma does not yet exist, but patients can still choose to receive various types of treatment for their cancer or even participate in clinical trials. Before a mesothelioma treatment option is recommended for use to the general population there are typically clinical trials conducted to test the effectiveness of the treatment. Patients can choose to participate in the trials and help test these new therapies. The hope is that these clinical trials will eventually lead to a cure.

Without clinical trials it would be much more difficult to determine which mesothelioma treatment option has potential benefits for mesothelioma patients. Clinical trials offer hope to cancer patients who may otherwise have none. Although a cure does not exist, certain treatments have been shown to increase the survival rate for mesothelioma patients, giving patients hope of an eventual mesothelioma treatment option that will result in a cure.

Mesothelioma Treatment Option: Surgery

There are three separate types of surgery for mesothelioma patients; palliative surgery, diagnostic surgery, and curative surgery. Palliative surgery is for the purpose of relieving symptoms and involves removing some of the cancer. However, this type of surgery does not offer a cure.

Diagnostic surgery is strictly used to determine if cancer actually exists in a patient or not. It also helps in identifying its location, if present, and is normally non-invasive.

The objective of curative surgery is to remove as much of the cancerous tissue as possible with the hope that it will be enough to cure the patient. After curative surgery is performed it is often followed up with chemotherapy or radiation therapy.

Mesothelioma Treatment Option: Chemotherapy

With this mesothelioma treatment option drugs used in chemotherapy are usually given intravenously with the objective of killing cancerous cells. Cancer cells can multiply quite quickly so it’s best to start chemotherapy treatment as soon as possible. Drugs that were previously used in chemotherapy showed poor results, but newer drugs appear to have more promise in the fight. Unfortunately, this type of treatment can also produce some unpleasant side effects.

Mesothelioma Treatment Option: Radiation Therapy

The purpose of radiation therapy as a mesothelioma treatment option is similar to chemotherapy, to kill cancer cells as well as limit the spread of cancer as much as possible. It is also referred to as “ionizing radiation” and is usually used after surgery has been performed. It is also sometimes used as palliative treatment in an effort to relieve some of the pain associated with the disease. Unfortunately, the pain relief is usually only temporary.

Mesothelioma Treatment Option: Photodynamic Therapy

This mesothelioma treatment option is used to treat mesothelioma located in the lung tissue. It is generally used only when the mesothelioma is localized and is not considered very effective when the cancer has metastasized. Photodynamic therapy involves giving the patient medication intravenously that makes cancer cells very sensitive to a specific type of light. A few days after treatment the patient is then exposed to this light, killing the cancer cells that have absorbed the medication.

Mesothelioma Treatment Option: Gene Therapy

Gene therapy is an experimental mesothelioma treatment option, but has shown promise in the treatment of mesothelioma patients. It involves infecting the patient with a virus that has been genetically altered. The virus enters cancer cells which causes them to produce a protein that can convert a non-toxic drug into a drug that can kill the cancer cells. The virus does not affect normal cells; only cancerous cells.

A short time after infecting the patient with the genetically altered virus, the patient is then treated with a chemotherapy drug that is not harmful to normal cells, but is engineered to be toxic to cancer cells. It is currently available only through clinical trials, but has shown some promising results.

Mesothelioma Treatment Option: Immunotherapy

A normally-functioning immune system will not kill cancer cells. However, it is possible to trick the patient’s immune system into killing these cancer cells through immunotherapy.

Immunotherapy is used as a mesothelioma treatment option in two different ways; either actively or passively. With active immunotherapy the patient has some of their mesothelioma cancer cells removed and then turned into a vaccine. The patient is then injected with the vaccine which can result in the patient’s immune system recognizing the “mesothelioma cancer cell vaccine” as a toxic substance, and therefore also recognizing the cancer itself as a toxic substance.

Passive immunotherapy does not act in the same way as active immunotherapy. It does not activate the patient’s immune system, but uses other substances to increase the patient’s immune system response to the cancerous cells.

These are the most common mesothelioma treatment options, but there are many others. Some clinical trials have shown great promise in the treatment of mesothelioma and it is hopeful that one or more of these trials will eventually lead to a mesothelioma treatment option that will result in a complete cure.

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