Leukemia is often referred to as “blood cancer” and the severity of the disease is self-evident. It is a clonal disease of the blood stem cells. These cloned stem cells do not differentiate into the mature cells that our body needs, and in the bone marrow and other hematopoietic tissues, these diseased cells accumulate in large numbers, inhibiting normal hematopoietic function and infiltrating other organs and tissues. This causes damage to the organs and immeasurable damage to the human body.
Chemotherapy is one of the important means to kill leukemia cells. Early, adequate, combined and individualized are the four principles of chemotherapy for leukemia. Only by understanding the principles of chemotherapy can you closely cooperate with your doctor’s treatment.
1.Early: It refers to early diagnosis and early treatment. Early and effective chemotherapy and early achievement of complete remission are the key factors to determine whether a complete remission period can be achieved and to obtain long-term survival. Patients with acute leukemia with a disease duration longer than 1 month before treatment have a significantly lower rate of complete remission. Therefore, leukemia should be examined as soon as possible after suspected and treated as soon as possible after diagnosis.
2. Adequate dose: The increase of chemotherapy dose and intensity can improve the complete remission rate and long-term survival rate, which should be moderate for patients who are young, old or in poor physical condition. Within a certain range, a 1-fold increase in chemotherapy dose increases the effectiveness of killing leukemia cells by 10-fold. A sufficient amount of chemotherapy can often kill 2-3 logarithmic leukemia cells in 1 course of treatment to bring them into complete remission. Moreover, early in the course of the disease, when the body is in relatively good health, leukemia cells are relatively less likely to develop drug resistance and are therefore able to tolerate adequate amounts of chemotherapy and easily achieve better outcomes. Therefore, in terms of long-term efficacy, do not worry about the toxic side effects of increasing the dose, as the doctor will choose the appropriate chemotherapy dose according to the specific situation. Because the purpose of leukemia treatment is to prolong survival, and ultimately hope to achieve the purpose of a cure.
3, combined: combined chemotherapy is currently the main means of treatment of acute leukemia, is one of the important advances in chemotherapy for leukemia in the past 20 years. The effect of combination chemotherapy is significantly better than single drug therapy. The combination of multiple drugs is much more effective, therefore, the combination of drugs is recommended for the induction therapy of acute leukemia.
The composition of combination chemotherapy drugs should have the following conditions: (1) act in different cell cycles; (2) different toxicity; (3) different mechanisms of action, affecting different periods of the cell cycle, with synergistic effects; (4) can kill leukemia cells more selectively.
4. Individualization: The principle of individualization of leukemia chemotherapy is an important development in leukemia treatment research and is receiving increasing attention and concern. Not only should different chemotherapy regimens be selected for different leukemia types, but the efficacy of the same chemotherapy regimen varies greatly among individuals with the same leukemia type, and even the response of the same individual to the same chemotherapy regimen varies at different times in leukemia. These circumstances highlight the importance of individualization in the treatment of leukemia.
Following the principles of chemotherapy and standardizing the treatment of leukemia is an effective means for us to overcome leukemia.