Therapy
Various therapeutic options are used to treat small bowel cancer. The most important form of therapy for small bowel cancer is surgery, as for all other types of bowel cancer. This form of therapy is often curative.
This means that the therapy aims at a cure. Unfortunately, surgery is often not possible or not curative because of the advanced stage of the disease. Sometimes metastases are removed or the tumor is at least reduced in size.
Whether an operation is possible and goal-oriented also depends on where the tumor is located. In some cases, the tumor has settled in places where surgery is not possible, for example, because other organs would be endangered by the operation. However, this decision is always made by the treating physicians.
If the patients are very old or severely weakened by the disease, surgery is usually not possible, as this can have a further negative impact on the patient’s condition. Chemotherapy is equally important. This is used for most types of cancer.
Chemotherapy is often used to reduce the size of the tumor so that it can then be operated on, or the symptoms can be alleviated. In addition, metastases can be removed or reduced by the therapy. Chemotherapy is a drug therapy that mainly attacks cells of the body that divide quickly, since cancer cells also multiply extremely quickly.
Chemotherapy can be administered as an inpatient or outpatient treatment. Since numerous other healthy cells in the body are also highly divisible, patients usually have many side effects that often make life difficult. Mostly they complain about gastrointestinal problems, as well as tiredness, hair loss and brittle finger and toenails.
The cells of the gastrointestinal tract and the red blood cells divide very often and are therefore also attacked. Even if especially the nausea and digestive disorders do not make life easy, it is also the missing hair that often causes an enormous psychological burden. Another very often used therapy is radiotherapy.
Ionizing radiation is used here, which specifically eliminates those cells that are irradiated. Radiation therapy also often reduces the size of tumors or destroys smaller growths. Even after this type of therapy, in some cases surgery is possible after the tumor has been reduced in size.
