By Mike
Cancer patients may have no other choice but to resort to in order to treat their illness. In oncology, adjuvant will have quite a special role for the patient because it is related to other cancer treatments. Adjuvant is an additional treatment given to the patient after surgery to help prevent any cancerous cells that may have not been completely removed during surgery from developing or increasing in number. The patient may relapse even if surgery has been performed because unfortunately, medicine is not sufficiently developed to be able to foresee whether cancer cells will reoccur or not. Radiotherapy or regular chemical-based treatments are included in the adjuvant category and they are recommended by the doctors based on some statistical evidence which is employed in order to figure out whether there is low or high risk in relapse for the patient. Statistics indicate that about a third of the patients who have undergone adjuvant treatment have already been completely cured with the help of the surgery alone. For those who are not included in the above mentioned third, the long term aim of the adjuvant is to increase

the life extent of the sufferer. The types of cancer in which adjuvant is used are quite various and here we may include colon cancer, lung, pancreatic, breast and prostate cancer as well as some forms of gynecological cancers. In terms of parallel treatments, adjuvant is complemented by neo-adjuvant chemotherapy. The neo-variant consists in the administration of drugs in the stage preceding the anti-cancer treatment per se. For example, neo-adjuvant could be used in the case of a patient suffering from breast cancer who will undergo breast-removal surgery. The purpose of such a type of therapy is to minimize the size of the tumor so that the surgery may be performed more efficiently and with less risk. All in all, adjuvant is presently considered more effective when it is prescribed after the tumor removal rather than before it because the remaining cancer cells are fewer in number and, as a result, the drug is more powerful on them. As for the drug efficiency, the level is a lot higher when the treatment is administered intravenously; another way of enhancing drug effects is to use it locally in the exact body part attacked by cancer.
This article is written by Mike