By Mike
Cancer patients may have no other choice but to resort to in order to treat their illness. In oncology, adjuvant plays an important role particularly in combination with 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 health condition is often susceptible to relapses in cancer cases, since no specialist can foresee the evolution or involution of cancer cells. 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 received adjuvant treatment have resumed good health only through surgical intervention. For the less fortunate ones, the long term objective of the adjuvant

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is to lengthen the life of the cancer patients. Adjuvant works for lots of cancer typologies from colon cancer to prostrate cancer, lung, breast and pancreatic tumors. Beside the adjuvant chemotherapy, there is also another type of treatment that resembles the former in name; that is, 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 have to undergo surgery for breast removal. The aim of such a type of therapy is to minimize the tumor size 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 used in the aftermath of the operation rather than prior to it. As for the drug efficiency, the level is a lot higher when the treatment is administered 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