Patients with malignant tumors should choose PICC placement for chemotherapy

The treatment of malignant tumors is a combination of surgery, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, targeted and molecular biotherapy. Neoadjuvant chemotherapy, postoperative adjuvant chemotherapy and chemotherapy for advanced metastatic tumors occupy an important therapeutic position. The vast majority of chemotherapeutic drugs are damaging to veins. For example, 5-FU, which is often used in the combined chemotherapy program for gastrointestinal tumors, head and neck tumors, breast tumors, if administered through peripheral veins, the incidence of phlebitis can be as high as 57%, and patients’ veins can be streaked with pain and redness and swelling, and streaked veins can be blackened and hyperpigmented in the late stage, which causes great pain to the patients; vincristine is also more often used in patients with lung and breast cancers, and after infusion, pain, water and swelling can be seen along the venous course, which can cause great pain and swelling. Reactions such as pain, blisters and even ulceration can occur along the vein direction; adriamycin-based chemotherapeutic drugs, such as leakage, can lead to local blisters, ulceration and chronic ulcer formation, for which there is no good treatment method at present. Docetaxel, cisplatin and other broad-spectrum antitumor drugs leakage can also lead to local tissue necrosis. Therefore, chemotherapy in oncology patients must be administered via PICC or central CVC catheter. However, the CVC catheter has a short retention time (2-4 weeks) and relatively more complications such as infection and thrombosis; the PICC catheter has a long retention time (up to 1 year depending on the material of the catheter), which can satisfy the needs of patients for multiple courses of treatment, and the complications such as infection and thrombosis are relatively low compared with the CVC catheter, therefore, the use of PICC catheter is recommended for chemotherapy of oncology patients.