Mesothelioma Treatment

By: Dan Lockland

Mesothelioma is one of the hardest forms of cancer to treat. Though treatment options do exist, the median survival time for patients afflicted with the condition is less than a year. New methods of treatment can be seen on the horizon, however, so patients have something to hope for.

The most common treatments for patients suffering from mesothelioma are surgery, radiation therapy, and chemotherapy. These are generally used in combination, with chemotherapy or radiation used after surgery. Surgery is usually only an option if the mesothelioma is detected before it spreads throughout the body.

Chemotherapy is designed to target and kill the cells that are afflicted by the mesothelioma. As with its use in the treatment of other forms of cancer, chemotherapy also kills healthy cells, causing the side effects that many people associate with the treatment. While older chemotherapy drugs had little positive effect, new drugs on the market are much more promising.

Radiation is used to limit the spread of mesothelioma. It's most often used after surgery, though in some instances, it is employed as a stand-alone treatment in order to relieve pain. Radiation rarely provides anything more than short-term relief from symptoms.

Thankfully, there are some new, exciting treatment options that are becoming more and more common every day. These methods give hope to the thousands of people suffering from this debilitating illness.

One of the newest treatments is called photodynamic therapy. Photdynamic therapy uses light energy to destroy cancer cells. The patient is given a drug intravenously that makes cells afflicted by mesothelioma highly sensitive to a particular kind of light. A couple of days after being given this drug, the patient is exposed to that light, and those cancerous cells are killed.

Another new treatment is called gene therapy. This technique uses genetic material to target cancer cells, making them more vulnerable to chemotherapy. This is commonly referred to as "suicide gene therapy", because it makes these cells produce substances that kill them. Unfortunately, this treatment is still only in the trial stage.

Lastly, immunotherapy "tricks" the body's immune system into killing the cancer sells. Normally, the body is unable to recognize the cells as diseases. With immunotherapy, cancerous cells are removed from the body, and then turned into a vaccine in a laboratory. The vaccine is then injected back into the patient. If the treatment is a success, the body treats the vaccine as harmful, and then follows the same path with the cancerous cells.