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A type of skin cancer, melanoma is diagnosed after the appearance of all sorts of dark spots on the epidermis. In order to treat melanoma, diagnostic tests must first be completed and then the cancer team will be able to recommend one or maybe more treatment options. Melanoma chemotherapy is one of the possibilities here. Anyway, patients should consider these treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. First of all, patients ought to understand everything about the treatments. The procedure will normally be established depending on the disease evolution and the thickness of the primary tumor.

Surgery and melanoma chemotherapy represent the main alternatives here. There are different choices in as far as surgery is concerned, depending on where and how advanced the melanoma is. Thus there are lymph node dissection, re-excision and amputation to decide on. Unfortunately, if besides melanoma, the cancer has spread to organs as well, surgery will not be the solution. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy could represent the most viable of possibilities. Systemic chemotherapy involved in such procedures normally uses injectable anticancer drugs.

These are usually injected into a vein or taken orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs get carried to all the body parts by blood. They attack cancer cells which have already spread beyond the skin to lymph nodes or other organs. The drugs kill cancer cells but, unfortunately they also destroy some normal cells as well. Among these normal cells that can be killed are blood-producing cells of the bone marrow, cells that line the gastrointestinal tract and cells of hair follicles. As a result, patients will go through temporary side effects like nausea and vomiting, mouth sores, loss of appetite and loss of hair.

Melanoma chemotherapy drugs include temozolomide, cisplatin, vinblastine, DTIC, BCNU and tamoxifen. DTIC can be used alone or with other chemotherapy drugs like BCNU and cisplatin. DTIC, BCNU and cisplatin combined with tamoxifen, which is a hormonal therapy drug commonly used in treating breast cancer, are known as the Dartmouth Regimen. Then there is another combination of DTIC, cisplatin and vinblastine to use against melanoma. To give one other melanoma chemotherapy drug example, we ought to refer to temozolomide, a modern medication administered orally.

Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs have a damaging impact on normal blood cells as well, anemia would be certainly diagnosed and this can reduce the blood clotting speed for instance, fatigue (frequently because of low red blood cell counts but also because of chemotherapy itself) and an increased infection risk (because of white blood cell shortage).

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