Veronicle Blog

Cancer doctors choose what course of treatment to pursue with every patient. There are many options. There is no one size fits all treatment course for pleural mesothelioma cancer patients. This is because of the relative rareness of the disease, the high mortality rate and low treatment success rate, and the few scientific studies to provide meaningful statistics.

Mesothelioma patients have historically had a bleak outlook, but doctors have recently made progress. Treatments for cancer are traditionally surgery (taking out the tumor and surrounding tissue), radiation (killing the cancerous cells with radiation), and chemotherapy (poisoning the cancerous cells.) Each one of these methods have problems. Traditional radiation therapy has not worked well with mesothelioma patients. In hopes to lessen damage to healthy tissue, researches are studying ways to aim radiation right at the tumor.

Surgery removes the mesothelial tissue around the tumor. The surgery is difficult and challenging, with unknown effects or benefits to patients. The usual chemotherapy cocktails effective on other cancers are not effective on mesothelioma, and different combinations of chemotherapy drugs have been tried without a lot of success. As with radiation, research is going toward controlling the physical location of the treatment with emphasis on the pleural cavity.

Many advanced techniques in cancer treatment are tried on mesothelioma patients because of its high fatality rate. These include biologic therapy such as the agent interleukin 2 and anti-angiogenesis drugs such as thalidomide. The new drug pemetrexed (brand name Alimta) has shown good results in extending life with mesotheliomas..

Oncologists consider the stage of mesothelioma, the location of the tumor, the patient’s age and state of health at the time. Two therapies that are extremely cutting-edge in fighting cancer are called photodynamic and gene therapy. Patients afflicted with mesothelioma are benefitting in these clinical trials.