Chemotherapy involves the use of anticancer drugs, usually taken intravenously or orally, to destroy breast cancer cells that have survived surgery. While radiation works locally or only at the site where the radiation is targeted, chemotherapy travels throughout the body, or systemically, to kills cancer cells that have broken away from the tumor and have begun to travel throughout the body. As a result, chemotherapy can be very useful in preventing recurrence or the spread of the breast cancer known as metastatsis. Standard chemotherapy regimens are usually administered every three weeks for three to six months. Great strides have been made in combatting the side effects, such as nausea and fatigue, commonly associated with chemotherapy.
Tamoxifen is the most common type of hormonal therapy.
The drug is taken by mouth daily for five years to prevent breast cancer recurrence. Patients with very large tumors that have spread to multiple lymph nodes are at increased risk of recurrence and require the most aggressive therapy. ABMT allows the oncologist to give very high doses of anticancer drugs. Patients are given infusions of their own specialized blood and immune cells, known as stem cells, removed from their blood or bone marrow prior to chemotherapy, to stave off serious complications of the high-dose therapy such as infection and bleeding. As pioneers in bone marrow transplantation, Hopkins experts have greatly refined this procedure in recent years, greatly reducing serious side effects and inpatient hospital stays.