Daily Health Care

General aspects on the treatment
Some people with hairy cell leukemia have few symptoms and require no immediate treatment. There are treatments for all patients with hairy cell leukemia with symptoms. Uses three kinds of treatment:

- Surgery
- Chemotherapy (using drugs to kill cancer cells)
- Biological therapy (using the body’s immune system to fight cancer).

Some clinical trials are evaluating the use of bone marrow transplants. If the spleen is swollen, the doctor may remove a surgical operation called a splenectomy.

Chemotherapy uses drugs to kill cancer cells. These can be taken orally or injected into a vein, muscle or under the skin. Chemotherapy is a systemic treatment because the drug enters the bloodstream, travels through the body and can kill cancer cells throughout the body.

The purpose of biologic therapy is to try to get the body to fight cancer. It uses materials made by the body or made in a laboratory to boost, direct or restore the body’s natural defenses against disease.

Biological therapy is known as biological response modifier (BRM) therapy or immunotherapy. Interferon, a substance produced by the body to fight the organisms that are not normally found in the body, often used to treat hairy cell leukemia.

Bone marrow transplantation is used to replace bone marrow with a healthy one. First, it destroys all the body’s bone marrow with high dose chemotherapy with or without radiation therapy. Then he takes healthy bone marrow from another person (a donor) whose tissue is equal or nearly equal to his. The donor may be a twin (the ideal), a brother or sister or other person with whom you have no kinship.

Finally, the donor’s healthy marrow is injected into a vein you and replace the destroyed bone marrow. A bone marrow transplant that used bone marrow from a relative or a person who has no relationship to you is called allogeneic bone marrow transplantation.

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