Medication for Lymphoma Patients

Lymphoma is a form of cancer that affects the lymphocyte cells of the immune system and although many cases are cured quickly and relatively easily some cases are found to be aggressive and need considerably more potent forms of treatment. This means that the treatment you as a lymphoma patient will receive will depend to a large extent on what type of lymphoma you have in addition to factors such as how quickly the cancer is growing, how far it has spread around the body and your general state of health.

Many cases of lymphoma will be treated with cytotoxic drugs, or chemotherapy. These drugs are either taken orally as a range of tablets or in more severe cases the patient is hospitalised and the drugs are administered intravenously by way of a continuous drip. Whichever way they are given, they have the overall effect of killing cancerous cells or occasionally they stop the cells from dividing further while combination radiotherapy kills them. There are a number of commonly prescribed drugs that many specialists rely on and the exact regime that you receive will depend on the factors mentioned above in addition to how your body responds to them. It may take a few rounds of chemotherapy before the most effective combination of drugs is discovered which has the biggest effect on your lymphoma.

New chemotherapeutic agents are being developed each year however there are a few tried and tested drugs which many specialists return to time and time again because of their effectiveness, and these include:

Vincristine - this stops the cancer cells from dividing and so the growth of the lymphoma is halted. Radiotherapy or other chemotherapeutic drugs are also used in combination with Vincristine which then work by killing the non-dividing cells.
Doxorubicin - this binds with the DNA of malignant lymphocytes and stops the cell from growing and dividing. The cell is also unable to carry out its normal internal functions and so eventually it dies.
Cyclophosphamide - this drug enters the malignant cancer cells and damages the DNA so that the cell can no longer divide or indeed survive. The DNA controls all of the cell functions and damaging specific points results in quick cell death.

A number of secondary medications are also commonly prescribed which either help the chemotherapeutic drugs to work or they reduce the side effects that are caused by the primary drugs. Unfortunately chemotherapy does cause many patients to suffer with side effects and these range from a slight feeling of nausea to a total loss of body hair. Many of the side effects can be treated with secondary medications which reduce them to a more reasonable level so that everyday life is not seriously affected. Some however can't be treated and simply have to be coped with.

Chemotherapy is often an ongoing process and it may be that you are in and out of hospital for months at a time. While this can have a huge effect on your life it doesn't seem quite so bad when you remember that without it you probably won't even have a life.