The Role of Surgery in Mesothelioma Treatment
Surgery in mesothelioma treatment is often combined with other therapies like chemotherapy and radiation, and aimed at removing tumors, reducing symptoms, and improving outcomes.
Surgery often plays a crucial role in managing lung cancer like mesothelioma, especially when combined with other treatments. This article explains the different surgical options for mesothelioma patients, the risks and benefits of each, and how surgery fits into the overall treatment plan.
However, the diagnosis difficulties in mesothelioma cases often limit the role of surgery in mesothelioma treatment.
Occupational and environmental cancers are hard to diagnose, mostly because these victims normally don’t have a family history of cancer, they don’t smoke heavily, and they don’t have other apparent risk factors. More on that below.
Surgery-based cancer treatments are very expensive. Cutting-edge cancer treatments are much more expensive. Recently, the government has taken steps to protect people from asbestos poisoning. But only an asbestos exposure lawyer can go to court and obtain the compensation these victims, and their families, need and deserve. Generally, mesothelioma victims and survivors have multiple legal options. All the choices can be confusing. Good asbestos exposure lawyers narrow these options, plan their work, and work their plans.
This rare and aggressive form of cancer could form in several areas of the body, but it’s nearly always lung cancer. As mentioned, lung cancer like mesothelioma is usually a genetic or lifestyle disease. But mesothelioma has nothing to do with these common risk factors. Instead, it’s one of the following:
Occupational:
Before 1980, many people in many industries, mostly construction, handled asbestos-laced products almost every day, and largely because they were unaware of the health risks, they wore almost no PPE (personal protective equipment). Other individuals worked in asbestos-laced facilities. Almost anything built before 1980, including Navy ships, contained asbestos.
Environmental:
For many years, take-home asbestos poisoning was the most common environmental cause. Exposed workers unwittingly carried these tiny fibers home on their clothes or elsewhere. Other people lived close to asbestos mines, which were usually open-air pits that resembled gravel quarries. Additionally, floating asbestos fibers infected everyone they touched.
Now, and in the years to come, talc-asbestos and 9/11 injuries may be the largest areas of environmental exposure asbestos litigation.
For decades, Johnson & Johnson aggressively marketed talcum powder to women who, because this talc was laced with asbestos, later developed cervical cancer. Likewise, the toxic cloud that descended upon NYC on 9/11 was laced with asbestos.
In many ways, mesothelioma resembles NSCLC (non small cell lung cancer), the most common kind of lung cancer. In both cases, the physical symptoms include:
Dry coughing,
Trouble breathing,
Overall fatigue, and
Radical weight loss.
Important differences between mesothelioma and NSCLC
However, mesothelioma is very different from NSCLC in several ways. We discussed origin issues above. Other differences include the latency period and growth pattern.
Generally, mesothelioma victims experience the aforementioned symptoms about fifty years after exposure. Technically, mesothelioma is side-of-the-lung cancer and not lung cancer. So, when trouble breathing and other symptoms appear, mesothelioma has spread to the lung itself, meaning the disease is in at least Stage III. Medical options, including surgical options, are much more limited at that point.
Due to the diagnosis delays mentioned above, the traditional combination of surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy often isn’t effective against mesothelioma. But that’s certainly not true in all cases, especially since these treatments are much more advanced today than they were in the 1990s.
Radiation
This treatment is usually, but certainly not always, the first punch in the three-punch combination. Sometimes, radiation alone is sufficient to put cancer on the canvas. Other times, radiation forces a tumor against the ropes, and the other two treatments finish it off.
Back in the day, high-dose radiation treatments weren’t an option for lung cancer victims. The radiation caused too much collateral damage to too many vital organs, specifically the heart. Therefore, doctors were forced to lower the settings and hope for the best.
Today’s radiation therapy machines deliver targeted and controlled bursts of radiation to the tumor itself. Furthermore, collateral damage that was once permanent is now repairable. Therefore, doctors can turn up the dial.
Radiation treatments often effectively shrink small Stage I and II cancer tumors. But once they start spreading, radiation isn’t as effective. Therefore, early diagnosis, which is usually unavailable in mesothelioma cases, may be the key to successful radiation treatments.
Surgery
In most cases, once radiation shrinks a tumor, doctors surgically remove it. For that reason, surgery is the centerpiece of most cancer treatment plans.
Doctors have performed countless surgical procedures over the years. Every time that happens, they tell other doctors what works, and what didn’t work. So, the technique is continually refined. That process continues even as you read these words, because somewhere in the world, people are undergoing cancer-related surgery at this moment.
Better facilities make a difference as well. For some people, a trip to the doctor in 2025 isn’t much different from a 1985 doctor’s visit. Cancer surgery is not one of those areas. Better tools are available and, as mentioned, doctors know how to maximize these tools.
The number of facilities makes a difference as well. Many large, urban areas have multiple cancer treatment facilities.
These and other advances come at a cost, mostly a financial cost. An asbestos exposure lawyer secures the funding to ensure that victims get the surgical and other treatment they need, not the treatment they can afford.
Chemotherapy
Most drugs are much more powerful today than they were even ten years ago, and chemotherapy drugs are no exception. Doctors often administer these drugs after a cancer patient undergoes radiation and/or surgical treatment, to kill remaining cancer cells.
Actually, chemotherapy drugs target all fast-dividing cells, a category that includes hair cells as well as cancer cells. That’s the main reason many people lose their hair as they undergo cancer treatments.
A few final words about cutting-edge mesothelioma treatments that may be coming soon to a theater near you. Gene editing therapy is the most promising one.
Cas9 uses CRISPR (clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats) sequences as a guide to recognize and open specific strands of DNA that are complementary to the CRISPR sequence. These treatments edit genes within living organisms. This editing process has a wide variety of applications, including basic biological research, development of biotechnological products, and disease treatment.
Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna shared the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in this area.