Common Mesothelioma Treatment Options

Even though there is no cure for mesothelioma there are many types of mesothelioma treatment options available to mesothelioma patients, but most of the promising approaches are still experimental. Although no single mesothelioma treatment option stands out as being far and away the most effective, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy are the most common.

Mesothelioma Treatment Options: Surgery

Certainly the most common mesothelioma treatment options involve surgery. As far as surgery is concerned there are three types. Surgery can be used as a method to achieve pain relief, as a curative procedure, and as a diagnostic procedure. Curative surgery involves removing as much of the cancer as possible and then hoping that it’s enough to render a cure. Palliative procedures are intended to relieve pain by removing at least a portion of the cancer cells. And diagnostic surgery is for the purpose of identifying and locating mesotheliomas.

The goal of chemotherapy is to kill cancerous cells by way of drugs. Cancer cells multiply very quickly so this type of treatment will only be successful if enough time has not passed that allows cells to spread. Radiation therapy is also designed to kill cancer cells just as chemotherapy. It can also be used to relieve pain.

By signing up for clinical trials a patient may find mesothelioma treatment options that are more effective for them. These are treatments that are still being tested and studied and which may offer improved results, but are not yet available to general patients. The most promising mesothelioma treatment options in the experimental area are immunotherapy, photodynamic treatment, and gene therapy.

There are several popular mesothelioma treatment options that are experimental. The objective of immunotherapy is to trick a person’s immune system into killing the cancer cells. Photodynamic therapy is only affective if the cancer is localized and has not yet metastasized. This experimental therapy causes cancer cells sensitive to a specific type of light and then exposes the cells to this light in an effort to kill them. Gene therapy is one of many experimental mesothelioma treatment options and infects a person’s cancer cells with an altered virus. This causes the cancerous tissue to produce a protein which makes it susceptible to a drug that is not harmful to normal cells.

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