Oncology Therapies

• Chemotherapy can be administered as pills.look at that image by Keith Frith from Fotolia.com
  
  Oncology is the medical field that studies and treats cancer and cancer patients. Improvements in oncology therapies have contributed to an increase in the five-year relative survival period for all patients diagnosed with cancer from 50 percent in the late 1970s to 66 percent in the late 1990s. The therapy used to treat a cancer depends on the stage of cancer and the patient.
  
  

Hormone Therapy

• Some types of cancer are susceptible to treatment with hormone therapy. These include prostate and certain types of breast cancer. The therapy works by reducing hormone effects on cancerous cells. Some hormone therapy drugs can block or remove hormone receptors on cancerous cells. Others stop hormone production in the body.
  
  

Immunotherapy

• Immunotherapy is a relatively new addition to cancer treatments. By either stimulating the immune system to work harder or giving the body synthetic immune system substances, the therapy uses the immune system to help the body fight cancer more effectively. Biological response modifiers (BRMs), the synthetic substances used in immunotherapy, can work in one of many ways, including stopping, controlling or suppressing the processes that promote the growth of cancer, and blocking or reversing the changes that a normal cell goes through to become a cancerous cell. Immunotherapy is commonly used as either part of a combination treatment or after another type of treatment to boost its effects.
  
  

Radiation

• Radiation therapy uses a radiation source to kill cancer cells. It is the most common type of cancer treatment, with approximately half of all cancer patients undergoing radiation therapy either by itself or in combination with another type of treatment. There are two types of radiation treatment: internal and external. Internal radiation implants a radiation source in or near a cancerous tumor. The implants that hold the radiation can be thin wires, plastic tubes, ribbons, capsules or seeds. Internal radiation may require an inpatient stay. External radiation delivers radiation from a source outside the body. It is an outpatient procedure used to treat most types of cancer, including bladder, brain, breast, lung and cervix.
  
  

Targeted Therapies

• Targeted therapy is an umbrella term that includes various therapies. The therapies are different but all alter the normal processes of cancerous cell progression. Types of targeted therapies include enzyme inhibitors, apoptosis-inducing drugs and angiogenesis inhibitors. Enzyme inhibitors block the specific proteins that signal cancer cells to grow; apoptosis-inducing drugs alter the proteins in the cancerous cells, resulting in the death of the cells; and angiogenesis inhibitors stop the process in which healthy blood vessels that feed the cancerous cells form in tissue near the tumor. Because targeted therapies focus on molecular and cellular changes specific to cancer cells, these therapies can be more effective than other types of cancer therapy.