METRONOMIC LOW DOSE TREATMENT

METRONOMIC LOW DOSE TREATMENT

In standard chemotherapy treatments; maximum doses are used to kill the cancer cells. These dosages cause more side effects. In recent years, it has been shown that using drugs with low doses can kill the cancer cells while causing less side effects. Consequently, patients can continue with their lives as normal while getting treated. The main characteristics and the dissimilarities of metronomic chemotherapy compared to its standard version are:

• No breaks from the treatment are needed.
• Compared to the maximum tolerable dose (MTD) used in standard therapies, biologically optimized low doses are used.
• The nonnecessity of bone marrow growth factors.
• Preference of oral drugs.
• Less side effects related to the treatment.
• Delayed resistance build-up to the drugs compared to standard treatments.
• Metronomic chemotherapy can be applied orally in daily doses while standard chemotherapy needs to be applied every 1-2-3 weeks.
• Standard chemotherapy effects fast multiplying cells, primarily cancer; whereas metronomic chemotherapy effects the endothelial cells of the veins which feed cancerous tissues.
• Metronomic chemotherapy needs less amount of supporting treatments and causes less side effects, while standard chemotherapy needs more supportive treatments and causes more side effects due to its effect of a rapid increase in blood level markers.
• Hospital admittance is a must in standard chemotherapy, in contrast to metronomic chemotherapy in which the patient doesn’t need to be admitted most of the time.
• Reducing the amount and the function of immune system supressing Treg cells in metronomic chemotherapy invokes the anti-cancer immune response. Metromic chemotherapy also increases the effectiveness of cancer vaccines.