One of the most prevalent diseases in the world today is cancer. Cancer can affect any body part and is not always easy to treat. Stage 2 cancer is a significant health issue. It can be detected early enough to be treated, but if it isn’t, it can become terminal.
The good news is that many different types of treatments are available for stage 2 cancer patients—and they can help you get your life back on track.
Bone Marrow Transplant
The main treatment for stage 2A, 2B, and some stage 3 adult acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) is chemotherapy. If leukemia does not respond adequately to chemotherapy, your doctor may recommend a bone marrow transplant.
Bone marrow transplantation is a procedure in which healthy, transplanted bone marrow cells produce new blood cells in the recipient.
Usually, this is done when someone has been treated with high doses of chemotherapy or radiation therapy to destroy all their diseased cells and then replace them with healthy donor cells from someone who is a close match. This procedure takes place in two stages:
- The first operation removes cancerous lymph nodes from under your arms or sometimes from elsewhere (for example, in areas where cancer has spread). This can cause swelling and pain around those areas until they heal over several days after surgery.
- A few days later, you have an auto graft transplant operation in which healthy donor cells are injected into your blood supply through an artery in one arm while being given powerful drugs that suppress immune responses so that your immune system doesn’t reject them.
Radiation Therapy
Radiation therapy is a treatment for cancer that utilizes high-power x-rays or other types of radiation to shrink tumors and kill cancer cells. It may be given in a single dose or as many as several dozen doses.
Radiation therapy aims to help cure your cancer, relieve symptoms, and reduce the chance your cancer will return. Radiation therapy’s side effects vary depending on the area(s) of your body that is being treated, how long you stay in the hospital each day, and other circumstances.
Targeted Drug Therapy
Targeted drug therapy is a treatment that uses specific drugs to kill cancer cells. This can be especially helpful for people with stage 2 cancer, as it is often effective at treating the remaining cancer cells after surgery.
The targeted drug may be a pill, liquid infusion, or injection into the body. Targeted drug therapy can be used in many types of cancers and works by either killing the cancer cells directly (cytotoxic) or stopping them from growing (targeted).
Chemotherapy
A type of treatment called chemotherapy employs chemicals to eradicate cancer cells. It can treat many types of cancer, including leukemia, lymphoma, and solid tumors in the breast, lung, ovaries, or colon.
Chemotherapy usually works by slowing or stopping the growth of cancer cells so that your body has time to heal from treatments like surgery and radiation therapy. Chemotherapy can also help relieve symptoms caused by advanced cancer, such as pain from bone metastases (secondary cancers) and anemia due to low red blood cell counts (sideroblastic anemia).
Conclusion
It is important to note that stage 2 cancer is not curable. It can be treated, however, and the treatment options listed above are very useful for this purpose. Stage 2 cancer does not mean that the patient will die from it either unless they do not seek treatment immediately after diagnosis or if the cancer progresses into a higher stage of severity.