1. Surgical Detection and Treatment Techniques
Your doctor will likely turn to surgery as the first line of defense against neuroblastoma. Surgical techniques are used to confirm cancer diagnoses, to assess the spread of any present growths and to treat malignancies.
If your child has an early-stage, localized case of neuroblastoma, it is sometimes possible for your doctor to remove the entire tumor in a single surgery. Essentially a curative treatment, these surgeries preempt the need for other, more taxing forms of treatment like chemotherapy and radiation.
However, surgery has its limitations once the cancer has spread. Metastasized neuroblastomas are usually treated using a combination of surgical, drug and radiation techniques. In advanced-stage cancers, the goal of surgery is to remove as much of the tumor as possible while exploring adjacent tissues to analyze the extent of the tumor spread.
2. Retinoid Therapy Can Fight Tumors
Doctors recognize the power of retinoids to turn abnormal or diseased cells into healthy, functional cells as a means of containing cancers. Chemically, retinoids are differentiating agents that are similar in structure to vitamin A, which can influence cell development. If your child has already undergone surgical, chemical or radiation treatment, long-term retinoid therapy can help fight off any lingering traces of the disease and inhibit the growth of new cancer cells. A 6-month regimen of a compound known as 13-cis-retinoic acid has been clinically proven to reduce recurrence rates.
3. Chemotherapy as a Supplementary or Primary Treatment
Because it's particularly hard on the developing bodies of children, chemotherapy is an option that's generally reserved for difficult or advanced-stage cases. It is often used in combination with surgery to reduce the mass of tumors that could not be removed surgically or to shrink their size prior to surgical intervention. However, children show very strong response rates to chemotherapy, with two-thirds of cases showing improvement when drug combinations are used to fight it. If your child's neuroblastoma has metastasized into the bones, chemotherapy drugs, such as topotecan, vincristine, doxorubicin, etoposide and others, can be used on their own or in combination with bone marrow suppressants. Bone marrow suppressors stop your child's body from replacing blood cells and platelets. If your child has cancer in his bones, these cells will be replaced with malignant cancer cells rather than healthy ones without drug intervention.
4. Radiation Techniques
Radiation is a less-common option than chemotherapy, given its harmful side effects on children. However, studies show that a combination of radiation and chemotherapy can be extremely effective in controlling and reducing the severity of complicated, advanced-stage neuroblastomas.
External-beam radiation is the standard technique your doctor will use. During this procedure, an intense beam of high-powered laser light is focused on malignant growths to shrink their size. While this can reduce the spread of the cancer and the pain it causes, side effects often occur. These include nausea, fatigue and diarrhea.
5. Blood and Bone Marrow Stem Cell Possibilities
If neuroblastoma affects your child's blood or bone marrow and suppressant drugs are used to stop new cancer cells from growing, your child will need supplementary treatment to replace the lost platelets, red blood cells and white blood cells.
An emerging technique, stem cell transplants are complex, multi-stage operations that harvest healthy cells and implant them in bodily tissues affected by cancer. There, they reproduce and replenish the dwindling supply of platelets, bone marrow and blood cells. While these techniques are still in their relative infancy, they show great promise. The American Cancer Society stresses that neuroblastoma is always treatable--talk to your doctor about all the options available to you.
