By Mike
Chemotherapy is often the only choice cancer sufferers have to regain a next-to-normal health condition. In oncology, adjuvant plays an important role particularly in combination with 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 show that about a third of the patients who have received adjuvant treatment have already been completely cured with the help of the surgery alone. For the less fortunate ones, the long term purpose of the adjuvant

chemotherapy 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 aim of such a type of therapy is to reduce the tumor size so that the surgery may be performed more efficiently and with less risk. All in all, adjuvant has been identified as more rewarding in results 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 enhancing drug efficiency is to use it locally in the exact body part attacked by cancer.
This article is written by Mike