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Leukemia treatment
There are three main solutions to treat leukemia. Chemotherapy is a collection of drugs which target cells that rapidly multiply (a key characteristic in cancer). Radiation is often used on patients who are at a high risk of the leukemia entering the brain. For resistant leukemias, bone marrow transplantation is considered. Created by Nauroz Syed.
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- how does the leukemia cells get inside the bone marrow?(11 votes)
- Leukemia cells originate in bone marrow from hematopoietic stem cells.(22 votes)
- if you use radiation to treat leukemia in the brain, wouldn't it just provoke another cancer in the brain?(7 votes)
- It does increase the risk of a new strain of cancer starting. But that increase in risk is so low compared to the benefit of actually curing a cancer that is already there.(5 votes)
- wasn't the first sightings of leukmia start in japan during world war 2 when two atomic bombs dropped on the land and many people who survived were diagnosed? or was it in america that people were first diagnosed?(5 votes)
- i've read that once at medscape, but can't remember much, go look it up on emedicine.medscape.com if you want(1 vote)
- what is the reason for people to shave off their hair during chemotherapy?(1 vote)
- Actually, their hair falls out. This is because the chemotherapy targets fast-growing cells. This property makes it good for treating cancer, because the cancer cells are fast-growing, but hair is also fast-growing and so it gets targeted too.(5 votes)
- I want to be a chemotherapist when I grow up. What are the degrees that re need to become a chemotherapist?(3 votes)
- How do you cure this cancer if a five year old has it and they have bean through all of the treatments but the radiation one and none of the other treatments have worked and their is leukemia in the brain?(2 votes)
- If available treatment options are not working, then there is nothing more they can really do. Unless their form of cancer has a research trial ongoing that they could participate in.(3 votes)
- Isn't bone marrow transplantation very dangerous? Also, you would make a mark in the bone and the leukemia might leak out onto the new bone marrow or into other bones. Why do we even do this?(2 votes)
- bones are already porous (meaning that they have teeny tiny holes in them) so the if the leukemia was going to spread, it would have done so already. Also the benefit to replacing bone marrow is that no new leukemia cells can be produced. If there are no more cancer cells to duplicate then there is no more cancer, so stem cell and bone marrow transplants are going to the source of the problem. A bone marrow transplant is not as dangerous as other transplants given the fact that it is like getting a really big shot into your bone, you kinda just need a band-aid and your body is very good at healing. It might help to consider the fact that when you break a bone your body is able to heal the bone within a couple of weeks so a small hole is no big deal. Don't forget that our bodies are amazing and and very very good at making themselves better when we help them out.(3 votes)
- At5:38, could you go into more detail about bone marrow transportation?(2 votes)
- https://medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003009.htm
Bone marrow transplantation.(3 votes)
- what is chemotharapy made of ?(2 votes)
- There are more than 100 chemo drugs used. It depends on what kind of cancer you have and the severity of it. Alkylating agents are a type of chemotherapy drug used to damage the DNA directly to kill the cells from reproducing. Antimetabolites are another type of drug that interferes with DNA and RNA growth by substituting for the regular building blocks of RNA and DNA. Of course, there are many more drugs for chemotherapy. Hope this helps.(2 votes)
- What happens if the leukemia cells are inside the brain? what are the symptoms?(2 votes)
Video transcript
Voiceover: So let's talk
about leukemia treatment. And generally speaking, we treat leukemia with chemotherapy with different types
of chemo, chemotherapy. And what chemotherapy is, is chemicals so that's where chemo comes from or chemicals that kill cells. And specifically chemotherapy targets rapidly dividing cells. So cancer cells, leukemia
cells are very rapidly dividing cells as we know, and that's how chemotherapy is able to target the leukemia cells. Now something to keep in mind is that, the cancer cells, leukemia cells are not the only rapidly
dividing cells inside the body, there are other rapidly dividing cells. And that's something that we'll talk about at greater lengths later on. So the way we administer chemotherapy is actually in three different phases. And the way I like to think
of this is kind of like a black ops mission. Something that's very organized and well thought out and very efficient. So the first phase of
chemotherapy treatment is called the induction phase. The induction phase. And the induction phase usually last somewhere around four weeks, and the goal of induction,
the goal of induction is to kill as many
leukemia cells as possible. The goal is to kill all
of the leukemia cells. And does this happen in four weeks? Well not necessarily all of the time, but that's our goal. Now, at the end of the four weeks, we don't just assume that
we've been successful in killing all of the leukemia cells. We, we double check to see
if we've been successful. And the way that we do
that is by taking a look inside the bone marrow. So if this is the bone,
we'll take a needle, we'll insert it inside the bone, and you guys know where
I'm going with this, and we'll draw out some fluid. So we'll do a bone marrow aspiration, and what we hope to see is
that all of the cells inside the bone marrow are normal cells, there are no more leukemia cells left, that there are only normal blood cells inside the bone marrow. And if that's the case,
if we've killed off all of the leukemia cells, we say that the patient
has gone into remission. And something that you
should keep in mind is that remission is not the same thing as a cure. So that's because that, if we, if a patient is in remission, the cancer cells are gone, but they can still come back, they can still recur, and that's why remission is not the same thing as a cure. So that's the first phase
of chemotherapy treatment. The second phase of chemotherapy treatment is called the consolidation,
consolidation phase. And the consolidation phase has two goals, the first goal is to kill
off any of the remaining leukemia cells. So if there are any
leukemia cells left behind from the induction phase, we aim to kill them off. And the second goal is to prevent the spread of the leukemia into the brain. So to prevent the leukemia cells from traveling to the brain, and the way we do that is by specifically injecting the chemotherapy, injecting the chemotherapy into the CSF, which is the fluid that's
surrounds the brain. And the reason why we have
to inject it into theirs because when we, the way
we normally administer chemotherapy into the blood, it doesn't readily
penetrate into the brain. So we have to specifically
inject it in into the CSF, and hopes that it will
reach the brain in that way. Okay, so that's the consolidation phase. And the last phase of
chemotherapy is called the maintenance, maintenance phase. And the maintenance phase
usually last between two or three years and
in the maintenance phase we usually use the same
chemotherapy agents as in the induction phase, but we administer them at a low dose. So administer at a low dose. And the goal over here is to prevent the leukemia from coming back, so prevent it from growing. So chemotherapy is usually the main way, the main method that we
use to treat leukemia. If however we know that we have a patient that is at high risk of
leukemia traveling to the brain, or if the patient already has
leukemia inside the brain, we use radiation, radiation specifically to the
brain to kill off those cells. So if, for example if this
is a patient over here I'm going to draw a stick
figure of a patient. We're going to use some
external beam radiation. So that's my external beam, and it's radiating the brain to kill off any leukemia cells in the brain. And something really important with this is that we never give this to kids who are under five years old. And that's because under the age of five the brain is still growing and administering radiation to the brain in a patient that young prevents the brain from growing the way that it should and it can lead to cognitive and psychological impairment. So that's, that's
something to be mindful of. Now if we have a patient
who has a leukemia that's resistant to
chemotherapy or radiation, or if we know that the
patient has a leukemia that tends to be very
resistant or hard to treat. We can try bone marrow transplantation, we can try bone marrow transplantation as a last ditch effort. So what we do over there
is we use the bone marrow from a donor and we can use that to replace the patients bone marrow. And so that in a nutshell
is how we treat leukemia.