What drugs are used in chemotherapy for gastric cancer

What drugs are used for chemotherapy of gastric cancer? Speaking of chemotherapy, many people will "shudder" involuntarily. The terrible side effects of chemotherapy make patients lose too much, and also cause serious economic burden. Today, I will tell you a good news. Now gastric cancer can be treated by taking some chemotherapy drugs orally!

Gastric cancer is one of the most common malignant tumors. Sixty to eighty percent of patients have already progressed locally or metastasized when diagnosed. Currently, the only effective way to treat advanced gastric cancer is chemotherapy, but traditional intravenous chemotherapy not only requires patients to spend a lot of time in the hospital, but may also cause complications due to intravenous injection. Therefore, most patients hope to choose oral medications instead of intravenous chemotherapy. With the clinical application of the new oral chemotherapy drug capecitabine, intravenous chemotherapy is no longer the only option.

Intravenous use of 5-FU is the cornerstone of traditional gastric cancer chemotherapy. As a commonly used tumor-killing substance, 5-FU can attack the DNA and RNA of tumor cells to kill tumor cells. Oral capecitabine can make 5-FU accumulate more in gastric tumor cells, but less act on other healthy cells. The results of a large international multicenter clinical trial showed that oral chemotherapy and intravenous chemotherapy are equally effective in overall survival. In the combination chemotherapy regimen for the treatment of advanced gastric cancer, oral chemotherapy can even effectively replace 5-FU, and the oral chemotherapy drug group can significantly improve the patient's overall survival compared with the 5-FU treatment group. Overall, oral chemotherapy has a higher tumor remission rate, the same progression-free survival and overall survival, fewer adverse reactions, and is more convenient to use.