The Secret Weapon of Cancer Treatment, Chemotherapy Drugs Directly Hit the Tumor, the Side Effects are Small and the Effect is Accurate

Interventional treatment is a method of minimally invasive treatment of local lesions through blood vessels, skin or the original pipeline of the human body under the guidance of imaging equipment (digital subtraction angiography, CT, ultrasonic MRI, etc.).




Interventional therapy includes vascular intervention and non-vascular intervention. Vascular interventions such as coronary angiography, cerebrovascular angiography, thrombolysis, stent placement, deep venous catheterization, blood vessel filter, intra-arterial infusion of chemotherapy drugs for local chemotherapy and so on.




Non-vascular interventions, such as percutaneous tumor ablation, ostomy under intervention, and recanalization, are all non-vascular interventions. It can be seen that interventional therapy covers many diseases, and tumor intervention is only one branch.



In tumor vascular interventional therapy, liver cancer is the most used malignant tumor. TACE, or hepatic artery chemoembolization, is currently the most commonly used method for the treatment of liver cancer in the States. This is because systemic treatment of liver cancer is not effective, and 20%-25% of the blood supply of normal liver cells comes from the hepatic artery and 75%-85% comes from the portal vein. 90%-95% of the blood supply of primary liver cancer comes from the hepatic artery. Therefore, blockage of the hepatic artery has little effect on normal liver cells, which provides an anatomical basis for vascular interventional treatment of liver cancer.



Through interventional therapy, the drugs can be limited to the tumor lesions as much as possible, and the side effects on the body and other organs can be reduced. Arterial drug perfusion therapy, through the artery to directly administer the tumor tissue, the local drug concentration can be increased by more than 10 times, and the tumor killing effect is doubled.




Relatively speaking, the distribution of interventional therapy drugs in the veins of the body is smaller, and the corresponding side effects are reduced. In tumor vascular interventional therapy, in addition to local injection of chemotherapeutic drugs, embolization agents such as gelatin sponge or iodized oil are also injected to block the blood supply of the tumor and seal the tumor vascular bed, thereby inhibiting tumor growth.

Interventional therapy can also be used for lung cancer, but it is generally not mainstream. Patients who can operate on lung cancer use surgery as much as possible, and early lung cancer that cannot tolerate surgery can be treated with radiofrequency or microwave ablation. It has begun to develop this treatment technology in 2000. Currently, it is the country with the largest number of cases of radiofrequency ablation for lung cancer in the world. Radiofrequency ablation is used to treat lung cancer. For lesions less than 5cm in diameter, especially lesions within 3cm, one treatment can completely inactivate the tumor.



Lung cancer patients can also use bronchial arterial chemoembolization. In theory, chemotherapy drugs can be applied to the blood supply artery of lung cancer, so that the content of chemotherapy drugs in tumor cells is higher than that of intravenous chemotherapy. It can also add embolic agents to embolize the blood supply artery. Thereby improving the treatment effect. But in fact, the clinical use of vascular interventional chemotherapy for lung cancer is much less than that for liver cancer.

The reason is that the effect of interventional chemotherapy for lung cancer is not ideal. This is because:


1. Multi-body arteries supply blood for lung cancer, which can often be supplied by multiple arteries;
2. Some peripheral lung cancers can supply blood from the pulmonary circulation;
3. For lung cancer metastases, the blood supply to the mediastinal hilar lymph nodes is all multi-body arteries.




Because the blood supply to the lungs is complicated and the blood flow is fast, simply injecting chemotherapy drugs through the bronchial artery will quickly take away the drugs, and the effect is not ideal. If embolization of large blood vessels is used, important parts may be ischemic. Affect the effect of systemic chemotherapy. Therefore, in clinical practice, some doctors will perform slow infusion of local arterial cannulation, combined with systemic chemotherapy, perform local radiotherapy after the treatment, or completely embolize the tumor blood vessels under intervention, so as to achieve better results.