Lung cancer is the largest number of cancers in China's urban population, ranking second among the rural population, physical examination found that more and more people with malignant tumors of the lungs, many people are at a loss after diagnosis, mainly because usually know very little about this disease, and do not care, once diagnosed, it is more overwhelmed, a lot of science found on the Internet is either not comprehensive or not easy to understand or unreliable, today I will introduce you to some of the basic methods and related knowledge of lung cancer treatment.
chemotherapy
Theoretically, all chemotherapy is called chemotherapy, which corresponds to physical therapy, and the scope of chemotherapy is very wide, and taking an antibiotic anti-inflammatory drug is chemotherapy or chemotherapy. But what we now call chemotherapy has specifically referred to the chemotherapy drug treatment of cancer, this type of drug is usually a drug that inhibits the proliferation of tumor cells, the cells of our body are divided into different stages in the process of proliferation, from one cell to two cells, tumor cells are also similar proliferation, different tumor drugs act on different stages, act on different participating components in the process of cell proliferation and division, such as directly acting on DNA, but also acting on other enzymes that help divide. Indiscriminate inhibition of tumors, but also inhibit normal cells, so chemotherapy self-damage 800, kill 1000 enemies, indeed the side effect is larger, but there is still no complete replacement for chemotherapy methods, because most tumor patients use chemotherapy drugs or benefit, other drugs may not be able to be applied to everyone.
Targeted therapy
Although the targeted drug has been around for more than ten years, there are still many patients who do not understand this drug, talking about cancer or only know chemotherapy radiotherapy, the treatment of this drug and chemotherapy are completely different, targeted drugs are mainly aimed at the mutated genes in cancer cells, as we all know, the difference between cancer cells and normal cells is that cancer cells contain a mutated heart - mutated genes, the DNA of normal cells is normal, there is no mutant gene, using this, We found drugs that can target mutant genes that can kill tumor cells without harming tumor cells, the best of both worlds. Targeted therapy is only for the tumor cell mutation gene drug, at present, there are hundreds of mutant gene types that cause tumors, but the corresponding drugs are only more than ten kinds, so to eat targeted drugs, you must do genetic testing at your own expense, equivalent to matching, with the ability to eat targeted drugs, otherwise you can not eat targeted drugs. At present, the four types of lung cancer - squamous cell carcinoma, adenocarcinoma, large cell lung cancer have the opportunity to eat targeted drugs, especially female non-smoking adenocarcinoma patients, about half of people can eat targeted drugs for EGFR, small cell lung cancer generally can not eat targeted drugs, and do not need to do genetic testing.
The efficacy of targeted therapy is relatively certain, not worse than the effect of chemotherapy, but the side effect is much smaller than chemotherapy, and some patients with advanced lung cancer can even survive for a long time without seeing that they are patients.
There are many other ways to treat lung cancer, and we will talk about immunotherapy and radiation therapy in the next article.