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 represents 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. Chemical-based treatments together with radiotherapy are part of the same adjuvant category prescribed by doctors to stop cancer spread. Statistics show that about a third of the patients who have received adjuvant treatment have resumed good health only through surgical intervention. For the less fortunate ones, the long term purpose of the adjuvant is to lengthen the life of the cancer patients. 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 instance, neo-adjuvant may be prescribed to a patient suffering from breast cancer who will undergo breast-removal surgery. The aim of such a type of therapy is to minimize the tumor size so that there are fewer risks and a higher rate of success in the surgical intervention. All in all, adjuvant has been identified as more rewarding in results 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. The drugs specific to this type of treatment are most efficient when they are administered directly into the blood of the patient, that is, intravenously; another way of increasing drug effects is to use it locally in the exact body part attacked by cancer.
This article is written by Mike