Choosing the Right Treatment for Angiosarcoma
Sunday, May 31st, 2009Angiosarcoma is a rare but extremely insidious type of cancer. The tumors grow and spread rapidly but not easily detected. When symptoms appear, the disease is typically well in the advanced stage. When diagnosis is delayed, treatment for angiosarcoma is usually late and ineffective.
Common treatments include:
*Chemotherapy
*Radiation
*Surgical resection
These rare tumors are invasive and malignant. Angiosarcomas start on the cells that make up the lining of blood vessels. Characterized by wide infiltration and very rapid spreading, this cancer may occur in breast, bone, liver, spleen or the heart. It may occur in any organ of the body. Tumors that appear on the neck and head are called Cutaneous Angiosarcoma.
Due to difficulty of margin of definitions and the aggressive nature of the disease, surgical resection is frequently used with primary angiosarcomas. Radiotherapy is often combined so that the tumor may be detected at the microscopic level. The disease is almost impossible to detect at cellular level because of the irregular vascular channels of the tumor. Survival rate usually improves when radiotherapy is added to surgical resection. However, this is not a common primary treatment.
Chemotherapy (or chemo-radiation) is generally used as treatment for angiosarcoma patients who cannot undergo surgical procedures. Directly on the site of the tumor growth, chemotherapy drugs are injected as method of treatment. A combination of the three methods is often recommended but the best sequence is yet to discover; so each treatment is performed individually. Before surgery, careful planning for both diagnostic and surgical is crucial.
These treatment options, even when aggressive, are not effective if the tumor is diagnosed in its more advanced stage. Prognosis, therefore, is often poor.
Continuous researches on other possible treatments for angiosarcoma have resulted to angiogenesis inhibitors (i.e. Paclitaxel and Sorafenib), which shown promising results; and the P53 tumor suppressor gene. The body has this gene naturally but many cancers have mutated it so resistance to these killer diseases has become difficult.