If you would read this brief notes, you would understand the merits of long term oral cancer therapy.
The increasing use of oral agents in breast cancer suggest that many of the concerns and perceptions about oral therapy, including efficacy and bioavailability, have been overcome, and that oral therapy are/ will play a major role in breast cancer management in the future in both the metastatic and adjuvant settings. Offering numerous benefits to patients, oncologists, oncology nurses, pharmacists and healthcare providers, the development and refinement of currently available oral treatments for breast cancer and the introduction of new oral agents are likely to overturn previous perceptions of oral chemotherapy.
One of the reasons for the necessity for long term oral therapy is to validate its efficacy and bioavailability,especially with metastatic situations, with drug tolerated individuals. Another factor is the merits of oral effective therapy over the illeffects of secondaries with the short or unpredictable survival span. Patients cross the years of survival expectancy to longitivity and this outweighs the fear of illeffects of prolonged therapy. We all know in most cases with metastasis, the survival is limited. Patient compliance will not be an issue with oral cancer therapy, because the seriousness of the disease will provide adequate motivation for adherence to the prescribed regimen.
Oral cyclophosphamide has been an important component of adjuvant therapy for breast cancer for over a decade, permitting self administration in a convenient setting and allowing patients to have a greater role in their therapy. Several all-oral regimens are also under investigation in breast cancer.
Studies of metronomic therapy using an all-oral combination of cyclophosphamide and methotrexate suggest that this is an effective and minimally toxic approach. In a large trial in patients with treated or untreated advanced breast cancer, low-dose oral cyclophosphamide and methotrexate produced responses in 21% of pat some clearly overcome the concerns held by oncologists regarding efficacy and bioavailability (e.g. addition of capecitabine to docetaxel improves survival in metastatic breast cancer) and have the potential to offer patients improved convenience and home-based therapy in studies patients median overall survival of 18.2 months [Objective response correlated with prolonged clinical benefit.
In the adjuvant setting, depending on the adverse-event profile, oral therapy enables patients to return to normal as soon as possible or permits different approaches to therapy (shortening intensive therapy and allowing maintenance therapy.
However, who could vouch for sure, the cancer(cell) free metastatic sites within stipulated time/or till the end of time?;
in blood cancer oral mercaptopurine is a successful therapy, though.
As Mitchellede puts it in a nut shell, patient is on treatment and it is still on its way, and I feel that yet time to go to the reach of, "Personal history of".
Thank you for your time.