Antineoplastic therapy - Ronny Allan - Living with Neuroendocrine Cancer

Tag: Antineoplastic therapy

Antineoplastic drugs are medications used to treat cancer. Antineoplastic drugs are also called anticancer, chemotherapy, chemo, cytotoxic, or hazardous drugs. These drugs come in many forms. Some are liquids that are injected into the patient, and some are pills that patients take.

There are much wider definitions that encompass every type of drug.

Antineoplastic agents or anticancer drugs represent a large and diverse class of medications. The antineoplastic agents are not easily classified. Historically, they are categorized as (1) alkylating agents, (2) antimetabolites, (3) natural products, (4) hormones and antagonists, and (5) miscellaneous. In recent years, however, the miscellaneous group has come to include some of the most important agents. Anticancer agents can also be classified by indication (lymphoma, leukemia, melanoma, solid tumor), mechanism of action (such as alkylating agents, antibiotics, biological response modifiers, antiandrogens, topoisomerase inhibitors or protein kinase inhibitors), chemical structure (folic acid analog, platinum coordination complex, purine or pyrimidine analog, monoclonal antibody) or as cytotoxic or nonspecific vs noncytotoxic or targeted.

To indicate that all antineoplastic drugs are “chemotherapy” seems outdated in the 21st century.

23Nov 2016 by Ronny Allan 12 Comments

Chemo or not Chemo – that is the question

Treatment

Chemo or not Chemo - that is the question OPINION POSTI'm continually seeing certain drugs for the treatment of Neuroendocrine Tumours (NETs) described as "chemotherapy". I think there must be some confusion with more modern drugs which are more targeted and work in a different way to Chemotherapy. According to Mayo Clinic: "In many ways, cytotoxic chemotherapy is "targeted" at specific molecules that regulate progression through the cell cycle; however, these targets are generally not specific for tumor cells. Because systemic cytotoxic chemotherapy targets all rapidly dividing cells, it also attacks hair follicles, gastrointestinal mucosa, and hematopoietic cells thereby inducing the classical side effects of treatment such as alopecia, nausea, diarrhea, mucositis, and bone marrow suppression. The newer generation of targeted biological therapies is still administered systemically as traditional chemotherapy;…