Blastoma Treatment

Your medical team should be informed concerning your medical history and medications, in order for them to plan you a safe treatment and not use drugs that can do harm to you. Supposing that your treatment of blastoma will be a surgery, you should fast for a couple of hours before the surgery and comply with other instructions set by specialists. As for chemotherapy and radiation therapy, they do not need any special preparation.

The decision of the treatment option relies upon the stage of the cancer. For instance, if a patient has stage 4 glioblastoma, a glioblastoma multiforme surgery cannot be performed. All options for blastoma treatment are:
• For early blastoma cancer stages, a surgery is generally an ideal decision. Specialists generally carry out glioblastoma multiforme surgery, neuroblastoma surgery and resection for other blastoma kinds.
•In order to support surgery, chemotherapy and radiation therapy are generally used. In chemotherapy, powerful medications used to destroy cancer cells, whereas in radiation therapy radioactive elements are used for the similar intentions.
• Other kinds of blastoma cancer treatment comprise immunotherapy which purposes to strengthen the patient’s immune system, and targeted therapy.

Blastoma treatment, particularly with chemotherapy and radiation therapy, may last months and the recovery period can be even longer, such as, years. For surgery, it relies upon the treated place – for all kinds of blastoma, the recovery period is differing, for instance, for glioblastoma surgery and retinoblastoma treatment.

Blastoma cancer treatment may cause numerous complications, including the damage to internal organs, bleeding and infections. Additionally, chemotherapy and radiotherapy can cause neurological problems or even infertility.

Particularly chemotherapy and radiation therapy may result in numerous side effects. These comprise:
• Memory and concentration issues
• Hair loss
• Weight loss
• Nausea, vomiting

As blastoma is a broad category, we cannot say a standardized success rate. We should look for specific blastoma kinds. For instance, survival rate of glioblastoma is 15-16 months for 50% of the patients. Whereas, 5-year survival rate of neuroblastoma is as high as 80%.

What Is Blastoma?
Blastoma is one of the kinds of cancer, in which precursor cells are attacked by cancer. For that reason it is predominantly found in young patients.

What are the Blastoma kinds?
Blastoma kinds consist of glioblastoma, neuroblastoma, nephroblastoma, ameloblastoma, retinoblastoma and pleuropulmonary blastoma.

What Is the Best Blastoma Cancer Treatment Available?
Kind of blastoma treatment used by specialist relies upon cancer stages and other factors. It is not possible to say that surgery is better than chemotherapy since they often are used at the same time, have different effects and can be used in different stages of blastoma cancer. 

This content is written and reviewed by our medical content team in September, 2019.