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Oncologists determine what course of treatment to pursue with a patient. There are numerous options. There is no one size fits all treatment option for peritoneal mesothelioma cancer patients. This is due to the cancers high mortality rate, rareness, low treatment success rate, and small number of studies to provide meaningful statistics.

The prospects for mesothelioma patients have been grim, but doctors have recently made progress. Customary treatments for cancer are surgery (removing the tumor and the tissue that surrounds it), chemotherapy (poisoning cancerous cells) and radiation (killing cancer cells with radiation) All three methods have problems. Mesothelioma patients treated with traditional radiation therapy have not responded well to it. Researchers are looking for ways of aiming radiation directly at the tumor in hopes that this will result in less damage to healthy tissue.

Surgery removes the mesothelial tissue around the tumor. The surgery is difficult and challenging, with unknown effects or benefits to patients. Most chemotherapy medication that work on other cancers typically do not work 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. Pemetrexed (Alimta) is a new drug that has shown results in extending life.

Oncologists consider the stage of mesothelioma, the location of the tumor, the patient’s age and state of health at the time. Theres also photodynamic therapy and gene therapy ” two far-out new ways of attacking cancer. Mesothelioma patients sometimes become involved in clinical trials in this area, and see benefits.

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