What is arterial interventional chemotherapy?

  As we all know, cancer cells need a lot of nutrition to grow in the body, so the blood vessels of tumors are thicker than normal ones and very disorganized. Therefore, arterial infusion chemotherapy can effectively overcome the shortcomings of intravenous chemotherapy and give full play to the advantages of local chemotherapy: chemotherapy drugs do not go through the dilution of body circulation and pulmonary circulation, and are delivered directly to the tumor trophoblastic vessels through the catheter, which not only improves the concentration of drugs in the tumor vessels, but also significantly enhances the killing effect of drugs on tumor cells;  In addition, the total drug dose is only 1/3 to 1/5 of the systemic chemotherapy dose due to local administration, and because the drug first returns to the venous system through the target area and then enters the body circulation, thus greatly reducing the adverse effects of chemotherapy drugs on the systemic systems and improving the tolerance of patients to chemotherapy drugs.  For some patients with underlying diseases or those of advanced age, arterial interventional chemotherapy has more advantages. Here I present a typical case: The patient was a 78-year-old male with a history of coronary heart disease.  After admission, the patient and his family refused intravenous chemotherapy because they were worried about the side effects of chemotherapeutic drugs, and finally we did arterial interventional chemotherapy for the patient, using the same chemotherapeutic drugs as intravenous chemotherapy (gemcitabine and cisplatin), but the total dose was surprising, with the dosage of gemcitabine being 1/8 of the amount of systemic chemotherapy and the dosage of cisplatin being 1/5 of the amount of systemic chemotherapy. The lung lesion shrinkage was very obvious, and the patient had almost no chemotherapy side effects.  Through this case above, it is very enlightening for our doctors and patients that such a small amount of drug is directly infused into the tumor body by arterial infusion, and the tumor shrinks rapidly with almost no drug side effects for the patient. Such a treatment method deserves the attention of patients and their families.