As a disease cancer consists of the uncontrolled malignant cellular growth, the invasion of organs and the metastasis. It seams that the cause of the condition is a combination of genetic predisposition and the exposure to some environmental toxins. Basically, the chemotherapy drug’s functioning principle is to impair cell division (mitosis), targeting rapidly-dividing cells. The damage they produce among cells, gives chemotherapy drugs the name of cytotoxic medication.
Chemotherapy, generally speaking, implies the treatment of a disease by means of chemicals which kill the sick cells. In more particular terms, chemotherapy is used to kill the cells of micro-organisms or cancer. Chemotherapy usually refers to antineoplastic drugs which are used to treat cancer or to the combination of these drugs into a cytotoxic standardized treatment regimen. Besides the reference to cancer treatment, chemotherapy also has an antibacterial dimension when it involves the use of antibiotics.
A chemotherapy drug, or better a combination of such drugs, functions on the principle of cellular destruction. Unfortunately, these drugs also affect/attack other healthy cells that divide rapidly. These other cells that get attacked by a chemotherapy drug are cells in the hair follicles, bone marrow and digestive tract. These results on the normal rapid-dividing cells are the side effects of chemotherapy: alopecia – hair loss, myelosuppression – decreased production of blood cells, and mucositis – inflammation of the digestive tract.
A chemotherapy drug could also be prescribed for the treatment of other problems such as autoimmune diseases – namely rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis. There are newer anti-cancer drugs which were designed to act directly against abnormal proteins in cancer cells; this treatment option is known as targeted therapy.
When talking about a chemotherapy drug, we should be aware that there are different types available at present. Thus there are antimetabolites, alkylating agents, topoisomerase inhibitors, anthracyclines and several others. Some newer agents, like monoclonal antibodies and tyrosine kinase inhibitors, do not interfere directly with the DNA as do the above mentioned ones.
Such modern drugs target a molecular abnormality in peculiar types of cancer such as chronic myelogenous leukemia or gastrointestinal stromal tumors. More special chemotherapy drug options only change the behavior of the tumor cells without affecting other tissues. Within these adjuvant therapies the option very commonly used is the hormone treatment.
Depending on the stage of the disease and the aim of the treatment, doctors will choose to administer one chemotherapy drug or a combination of drugs according to one or another of the existing strategies.
