Thursday, March 13, 2008
Treatment Options for Mantle Cell Lymphoma
A rare form of the Non-Hodgkin disease is the Mantle cell lymphoma. This disease is quite dangerous because its tumor grows very fast and ends up affecting most of the organs. Generally, people are diagnosed with mantle cell lymphoma only when the disease has affected more organs and so, treating them is a little bit difficult because several areas of the body must be treated in the same time. The most indicated treatment in this case is chemotherapy.
Chemotherapy tries to stop cancerous cells from growing or dividing. There can be used oral drugs or drugs injected into the vein or muscle that will reach the cancer cells by entering the bloodstream, and is called systemic chemotherapy. In mantle cell lymphoma doctors use a combination of four drugs administered in a single day and then repeated every 3 weeks for 6 times.
In most of the cases, mantle cell lymphoma therapy is not useful and even if the response to the treatment seemed to be good, the disease comes back very often. In preventing this, doctors have used different drug combinations and the most successful was one treatment used in leukemia too. This treatment is unbearable for many of the patients due to its side effects, and doctors will not recommend this drug combination if they feel that the patient will not tolerate the treatment.
In most cases, after chemotherapy is done, stem cells previously taken from the patient’s blood or bone marrow or from a donor will be thawed and replaced through an infusion, in order to restore the body’s blood cells destroyed by the chemotherapy.
Biological therapy has proved to be useful in treating many forms of lymphoma, and it uses monoclonal antibodies. These antibodies are made from an immune system cell and are designed to seek and destroy all the substances that can help cancer cells to grow and develop. One of the monoclonal antibodies used in treating Non-Hodgkin lymphoma is Rituximab. This antibody could be used in treating mantle cell lymphoma too.
There have been developed some new drugs but they are still under tests in clinical trials. Bortezomib is one of them and using it seems to lead to the death of cancer cells.
Using radiation therapy proved to be inefficient because it did not lead to a remarkably extinction of the cancer cells and it only weakened the human organism.
Until now there is no cure for this disease and no certain effective treatment. In order to discover a useful therapy, doctors will encourage you to join a clinical trial and help them improve the medical treatment of this terrible disease.
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