Bone Cancer Treatment

The common methods of Bone cancer treatment include surgery, radiation therapy, and/or chemotherapy.

The doctor often uses a combination of treatment methods, depending on the patient’s requirement.

Bone cancer is a malignancy in bone. Cancer that originates in the bone is termed as primary bone cancer. This type of cancer is very rare. Children are affected mostly by this type rather than adults.

More often, cancer cells spread metastasize to the bones from other parts of the body such as the breasts, lungs, and prostate. This type of bone cancer is secondary bone cancer or metastatic bone cancer.

The prognosis or the chance of recovery and the treatment as well directly depends on few important facts such as the size, location, type, and stage of the cancer. This means that how far the cancer has spread, since how long the patient had symptoms (Bone Cancer Symptoms), if the surgery already performed then how much of the cancer is taken out by surgery and/or how much cancer is killed by chemotherapy. Also the prognosis and the treatment depend extensively on the patient’s age, blood and other test results, and general health.

Bone Cancer Treatment: Surgery

Surgery is performed on patients with osteosarcoma in order to remove the tumor. Sometimes the part may be amputated if no other option left in order to get rid of the cancer from spreading.

Majority of the cases the arm or the leg is amputated. Today limb sparing surgery has become common and most successful with the combination of chemotherapy and radiation with this surgical procedure.

Bone Cancer Treatment: Chemotherapy

It is described as a systemic procedure of cancer treatment as the drugs used in this method of bone cancer treatment aim to travel through the entire blood stream thus distributing evenly and giving an overall treatment to the entire body as well.

There are various methods of chemotherapy treatment implemented. Some of them are the regional chemotherapy where the drug is directly injected into the tumor to shrink or kill the cancer tumor. The other methods are the adjuvant and the neoadjuvant chemotherapies where the drugs are given either after the surgery or before the surgery respectively depending on the stage of the cancer and the condition of the patient.

Bone Cancer Treatment: Radiation therapy

Radiation therapy (also called radiotherapy) uses high-energy x-rays to destroy bone cancer cells. Like surgery, radiation therapy is local therapy. It affects cancer cells only in the treated area. In treating any type of cancer the radiation therapy is the most common method of treatment opted.

In this process the cancer cells are destroyed along with some of the normal cells. But as the cancer cells rapidly multiply than the normal cells the chances of damage to the cancer cells is more than the healthy cells.

The combination of bone cancer treatments depend on the stage of bone cancer of the patient. The decision is entirely on the doctor to opt for the best combination bone cancer treatment methods or implement only a single method of bone cancer treatment.