Cancer Chemotherapy in Clinical Practice (eBook)

This excellent new book summarizes the whole range of systemic cancer therapies, explaining their mode of action and potential side-effects, as well as their clinical applications. It is divided into three sections. The first tackles the theoretical basis of cancer chemotherapy: following an historical introduction, the different treatment modalities are explained in the context of basic tumor biology. The text then moves on to the subject's practical aspects and covers dosing and drug delivery together with an extensive discussion of possible side-effects. Finally, Priestman looks at chemotherapy in the management of cancers. The book has a consistency of style which makes a wealth of complex information both readily accessible and easily understandable.

Dr Terrence J. Priestman is Clinical Director, Cancer Services, New Cross Hospital Wolverhampton, UK; Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer, University of Birmingham, UK; and Series Editor, Cancer BACUP publications. In addition to having published numerous articles and contributed 16 chapters, he also wrote 4 books on cancer chemotherapy, gastrointestinal cancer, coping with chemotherapy, and coping with breast cancer. He was founder editor of Clinical Oncology, deputy editor of Clinical Radiology, and editorial board member of British Journal of Cancer and Cancer Immunology & Immunotherapy. He has also been writing for the charity 'Cancerbackup', which provides information to cancer patients and their carers.

---

This book is intended as a basic overview of the drug treatment of cancer for junior doctors and specialist nurses who come into contact with people having chemotherapy as part of their day-- day work. The aim is to provide a context to those treatments, explaining what the drugs are, how they work, some of their more likely side effects, how they are used in the treatment of the commoner cancers and what therapeutic results might be expected. The first use of the word chemotherapy is credited to Paul Ehrlich (1854-1915), who used it to describe the arsenical compounds he developed to treat syphilis. Nowadays when people talk about 'chemotherapy', as part of cancer treatment, they are usually referring to the use of cytotoxic drugs. Cytotoxics have dominated systemic cancer therapy for the last 50 years, and their use has resulted in enormous improvements in outcome. But they are only one component of the drug treatment of malignancy. Hormonal therapies are another major contributor to increased cure rates and survival times, and the last decade has seen an explosion of entirely new types of drugs for cancer treatment. The latter are mainly drugs specifically targeted against cancer cells (whereas cytotoxics affect both normal and malignant cells). These newer compounds have sometimes been popularly termed 'magic bullets', which again takes us back to Ehrlich, as this was another phrase he used to describe his treatments.