Melanoma is a type of cancer that affects the skin and is recognized by the dark spots that appear on the dermis. These skin surface formations do not represent the only symptoms of the disease, more conclusive tests are performed before passing the initial cancer diagnosis and establishing a potential treatment. Melanoma chemotherapy is one of the possibilities here. Anyway, patients should consider these treatment variants carefully, without rushing into one of them. Proper information on the alternative treatments is the first step. It is obvious that the choice of the procedure depends on the thickness of the primary tumor and the stage of the disease mainly.

Among the treatments for melanoma there are options like surgery and chemotherapy. 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. If melanoma has spread from the skin to distant organs, then surgery will not be a curable option to use. Therefore, melanoma chemotherapy might be the solution. Systemic chemotherapy involved in such procedures normally relies on injectable anticancer drugs.

These are usually injected into a vein or taken orally. Melanoma chemotherapy drugs travel through the bloodstream to all parts of the body. They attack cancer cells which have already spread beyond the skin to lymph nodes or other organs. The same medication that kills the tumor will also damage some healthy tissues too. The blood producing cells in the bone marrow, the hair follicles and the cells in the gastrointestinal tract represent the first collateral victims of the chemical cancer bombarding. 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, bear the name Dartmouth Regimen. Then melanoma is also treated by a combination of vinblastine, cisplastin and DTIC. Temozolomide is a newer medicine, whose mode of function is similar to that of DTIC, except that it is used in the form of a pill.

Since melanoma chemotherapy drugs kill normal blood cells as well, patients might experience low blood cell counts and this can reduce the blood clotting speed for instance, excessive tiredness (frequently because of low red blood cell counts but also because of chemotherapy itself) and an increased infection risk (because the number of blood cells drops too).

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