What medicine to take to treat nasopharyngeal carcinoma

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is a very serious disease. The prognosis of patients with this disease is very poor. After suffering from nasopharyngeal carcinoma, many patients do not know what medications can be used to treat nasopharyngeal carcinoma. So what medicines can be taken to treat nasopharyngeal carcinoma? Below, we will introduce some treatment methods for nasopharyngeal carcinoma. I hope it will be helpful to everyone.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma has obvious epidemiological characteristics. It is more common in men, about twice as common in women. It can occur in all age groups, but most cases occur between 30 and 50 years old.

There are obvious regional differences in the distribution of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in China, with Zhaoqing, Foshan, Guangzhou in central Guangdong Province and Wuzhou in eastern Guangxi Province as the high-incidence centers, and gradually decreasing towards the surrounding areas.

Because the nasopharynx is hidden and the early symptoms are complex, it is easy to misdiagnose and miss the diagnosis. At the same time, nasopharyngeal carcinoma has the characteristics of metastasis to the cervical lymph nodes and cranial nerves when the primary cancer lesion is very small or not obvious.

Chemotherapy

It is mainly used for middle and late stage cases, patients who cannot be controlled or relapse after radiotherapy, so it is an auxiliary or palliative treatment.

The main effects of chemotherapy:

1. As a chemosensitizer to increase the sensitivity of tumors to radiation, it is often used simultaneously with radiotherapy;

2. For patients with distant metastasis;

3. First use chemotherapy to shrink the advanced tumor to a certain extent, and then use radiotherapy;

4After radiotherapy, preventive chemotherapy should be carried out regularly according to the cell dynamics cycle.

There are three common ways of administering medication:

(1) Systemic chemotherapy: It can be taken orally, injected intramuscularly, or intravenously. Commonly used drugs include nitrogen mustard, cyclophosphamide, 5-fluorouracil, bleomycin, thiotepa, etc. One drug can be used alone or in combination.

(2) Half-body chemotherapy: It is a therapy that compresses the abdominal aorta, temporarily blocks the blood circulation in the lower body, and rapidly injects nitrogen mustard into the veins of the upper limbs. The nitrogen mustard takes effect 2 to 3 minutes after injection into the body, and the drug potency is reduced by half after 15 minutes. This can both increase the drug concentration in the upper body and protect the bone marrow hematopoietic function in the lower body.

Contraindications for half-body chemotherapy: 1) patients with hypertension and heart disease; 2) the elderly, weak, and obese; 3) those with superior vena cava compression; 4) those with cirrhosis and hepatomegaly; 5) those with severe liver and kidney damage; 6) those with a white blood cell count below 3×109/L.

(3) Arterial catheter chemotherapy: It can increase the drug concentration in the nasopharynx and reduce systemic side effects. Anticancer drugs are injected through retrograde catheterization of the superficial temporal artery or facial artery. It has a certain short-term effect on early stage (stage I and II) cases with single small upper deep cervical lymph node metastasis, late stage cases with cranial nerve involvement, or local residual or recurrent cases in the nasopharynx after radiotherapy. Commonly used anticancer drugs include 5-fluorouracil, bleomycin, cisplatin, etc.

Nasopharyngeal carcinoma is a highly malignant cancer. The prognosis of this disease is very poor. We have introduced the medication treatment methods above. We hope that you can choose the treatment method that suits you according to your actual condition.