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How childhood rhabdomyosarcoma is treated
There are treatments for all patients with childhood rhabdomyosarcoma. Three
types of treatment are used, most often in combination with each other:
Surgery is a common treatment for rhabdomyosarcoma. Depending on where the
cancer is, your child’s doctor will take out as much of the cancer as possible,
along with some of the normal tissue around it. If the cancer is too large to remove or in a place
where it cannot be removed, surgery may be limited to taking out only a small
piece of the cancer (biopsy). Surgery is usually followed by chemotherapy and
radiation therapy.
Sometimes a second surgery is done to remove cancer that remains after these treatments.
Chemotherapy uses drugs to kill cancer cells. Chemotherapy may be taken by
mouth in the form of a pill, or it may be put into the body by a needle in a
vein or muscle. Chemotherapy is called a systemic treatment because the drugs
enter the bloodstream, travel through the body, and can kill cancer cells
throughout the body.
Radiation therapy uses high-energy x-rays to kill cancer cells and shrink tumors. Radiation may come from a machine outside the body (external radiation
therapy) or from putting materials that produce radiation (radioisotopes)
through thin plastic tubes in the area where the cancer cells are found
(internal radiation therapy). Clinical trials are testing radiation given in
several small doses per day (hyperfractionated radiation therapy).
High-dose chemotherapy with stem cell transplant is being studied for rhabdomyosarcoma. This is a method of giving high doses of chemotherapy and replacing blood-forming cells destroyed by the cancer treatment. Stem cells (immature blood cells) are removed from the blood or bone marrow of the patient or a donor and are frozen and stored. After the chemotherapy is completed, the stored stem cells are thawed and given back to the patient through an infusion. These reinfused stem cells grow into (and restore) the body's blood cells. When the patient's own stem cells are used, it is called an autologous stem cell transplant.
Treatment by stage
Treatment for childhood rhabdomyosarcoma depends on where the cancer is, how
far it has spread, and what the cancer cells look like under a microscope.
Your child may receive treatment that is considered standard based on its
effectiveness in a number of patients in past studies, or you may choose to
have your child go into a clinical trial. Not all patients are cured with
standard therapy and some standard treatments may have more side effects than
are desired. For these reasons, clinical trials are designed to test new
treatments and to find better ways to treat cancer patients. A large cooperative group clinical trial comparing new treatments with standard
treatments is ongoing in most parts of the country for all stages of
rhabdomyosarcoma. |
