I will be on vacation for seven weeks

Because of some personal commitments I will not be updating this blog for a few weeks. Please check the blog during late December or early January



Sorry for the inconvenience caused.

Chemotherapy for Mesothelioma

Chemotherapy is a treatment in which doctors use drugs on patients which kills the cancer cells. Chemotherapy for mesothelioma can be used in different situations such as


1) To minimize the tumor before surgery

2) To kill remaining cancer cells after surgery

3) To kill cancer tumor that recurs

4) To use on patients who are not surgical candidates.

Chemotherapy is being continually developed by the researchers. Good news for the mesothelioma patients is that, there is considerable progress is the systematic treatment of this disease in last few years. Pemetrexed is seen as the most promising drug to treat mesothelioma. This is an inhibitor of proteins including thymidylate synthase and dihydrofolate reductase which are required in synthesis of DNA.

Chemotherapy drugs are often used in combination of others and this process is called combination therapy. When cancer occurs, bad cells in the body keep growing as exponential rate and the anticancer drugs can help the bad cells keep in control and during the process good cells may also get damaged which is the main reason for side effects. The cells most likely to be affected are the fast-growing normal cells such as the blood cells forming in bone marrow, and cells in the digestive tract which includes the mouth, stomach, intestines, and esophagus. Hair follicles may also be affected, hence, hair loss during chemotherapy. Some drugs affect cells of vital organs, such as the heart, kidney, bladder, lungs, and nervous system.

Mesothelioma Prognosis

As in many of the diseases, the important factor determining the prognosis of mesothelioma is how severe is the cancer. Peritoneal mesothelioma prognosis is particularly crippled as the time by which patient recognizes the symptoms valuable time is lost as the initial symptoms are very light on the body making it difficult to identify.


Peritoneal mesothelioma has multiple stages. Pleural and peritoneal types of mesothelioma are very hard to be treated. They would ultimately be diagnosed at an advanced state and the statistics show that there are very few survivors. There are lot of contradictions among the studies whether peritoneal mesothelioma or pleural mesothelioma is more deadlier than other but one thing which cannot be contradicted is they both are difficult to treat as there is no proper treatment.

Only 10% of all who are diagnosed with mesothelioma live 3 years or more and only 5% of those go beyond 5 years, which shows the deadly nature of the disease. Only in people where mesothelioma is diagnosed in the early states, the survival rate goes till 50% for who lived more than three years. This was a study conducted on more than 200 people of mesothelioma affected people.

There was a broad study conducted in Europe on 5 million people and the outcome of that research is nothing different as only 25 % of people with pleural mesothelioma and 35% with peritoneal mesothelioma survived more than 10 months after study.

The overall health of the patient could also determine the prognosis of the patient. The healthier the higher chances for more days of survival. However, patients should not get disheartened as the statistics represent only the past but the future could be bright and different.