Depending upon the kind and stage of cancer, there are multiple treatments available. Few common treatments for cancer include surgery, radiation therapy, chemotherapy, immunotherapy, targeted therapy, hormone therapy, stem cell transplant, and precision medicine. While some people will have only one treatment, others have a combination of treatments like surgery with chemotherapy and or radiation therapy.
More than one method of treatment is called combination therapy or multimodality therapy. After years of trial and research, doctors discovered that the key to fight cancer effectively is combining several treatments. Cancer patients are observed to have better survival rate when they are given combination of treatment therapies rather than just one type treatment.
The multi-drug chemotherapy regimens effectively fight cancer micro-metastasis (a complex process that causes cancer cells to spread from their site of origin and form distant tumors too small for doctors to detect) and cure various cancers.
While different and effective modalities are available for various cancers cure; early diagnosis and detection is crucial to allow optimal treatment plan, or else it may compromise the cure potential for some tumors. Since surgeons play a key role in the care of cancer patients, they must maintain a sound knowledge of multimodality therapy for the cancers that they treat.
While various studies have reported positive findings for varied multimodal therapies, each patient is likely to respond differently and may require customised treatment combinations.
Although there are some centers of excellence providing multimodality protocol-based treatment, the vast majority of patients undergo inadequate and inappropriate treatment due to lack of high-quality infrastructure and sometimes skills, and above all financial resources. In the coming years, the most important steps needed are creating awareness about cancer risk factors, early detection, along with making screening available to the population at risk, and providing multimodality treatment available to the majority at an affordable cost.
Newer experimental therapies like immunotherapy and photodynamic therapy, alongside existing traditional therapies are being used which has improved patient's survival rate and overall quality of life. Nanomedicine as a multimodality treatment of cancer is the latest evolution in this field. The advantage of nano delivery system is that it simultaneously delivers different agents to the active site, causing a special interaction between the agents, which cannot be achieved by traditional medicine.
listed are few factors that need to be considered before determining the right multimodal therapy treatment:
(The writer is Senior Consultant, Medical Oncology Department, Bhagwan Mahaveer CancerHospital & Research Centre, Jaipur )