A lot of people have some common misconceptions regarding pancreatic cancer overview, causes and treatment options. It’s often thought that pancreas removal is the sole option you have when it comes to treating this particular cancer. Well, surgery is indeed necessary at certain stages of cancer, however, it’s not the only treatment option available to mankind. In this case, you must be aware of something called clinical trials.
Clinical trials for new treatment options
While making your treatment plan decisions, we encourage you to consider the clinical trials as one of the fair options. So, what exactly is a clinical trial? Well, a clinical trial is one of the research studies that allow you to test a new treatment approach. Doctors would want to be sure whether a particular new treatment procedure is safe for the patients. They would also try to figure out whether it’s more effective as well as better than the regular standard treatment. This is where clinical trials come into the rescue.
Clinical trials are often used to test a new drug, new doses of regular drugs, or new combinations of existing treatments. The clinical trial is indeed one of the most appropriate options to consider to treat all stages of cancer. Now, any regular person like you and us might not have a thorough understanding of which treatment options will suit best. In that case, consider consulting with your doctor. He might be the best person to show you the right way of pancreatic cancer treatment.
Cancer treatment
In case you don’t know already, several types of doctors and health care professionals come together under the same roof for creating a particular patient’s overall treatment plan. The pancreatic cancer treatment plan typically combines different sorts of treatments. This is what we term, ‘multidisciplinary team’. Cancer care teams generally include health care professionals, like physician assistants, social workers, oncology nurses, pharmacists, dietitians, counselors, and others.
Surgery
Pancreatic cancer surgery is carried out to remove some parts of the pancreas or the entire organ. It all depends on the size and location of the pancreatic tumor. In general cases, the tissue area that has the tumor along with some healthy portion of tissue around the affected region is often removed in a process, known as margin. One of the goals of surgery is to achieve “clear margins” or “negative margins.” This means that no cancer cells should be present in the edges of the healthy tissue that has been removed. There are different kinds of pancreatic cancer surgery that you might opt for:
- Laparoscopy
- Tumor removal surgery
Chemotherapy
Chemotherapy uses drugs to destroy cancerous cells, by ending the cancer cells’ ability to grow.
Radiation therapy
Radiation therapy uses high-energy x-rays or other particles for destroying existing cancer cells. The most common radiation treatment type is known as external-beam radiation therapy.
Which cancer treatment option is suitable for you depends on numerous factors, such as stage and the type of cancer, its potential side effects, as well as the patient’s preferences and his overall health conditions. It’s important that you take enough time to figure out everything about your treatment options and make sure that you ask questions. You must have a clear understanding of the goals of each of your treatment plan and what expectations you can set while receiving the treatment.
