Hormone Therapy

Cancer that uses hormones to grow can be slowed or stopped with hormone therapy. The hormones in the body are targeted and located using hormone therapy. Hormone therapy is advantageous because it can be completed in a single visit, and it doesn’t require long-term treatment with medicines. Hormone therapy works in different ways depending on the type. It will work in either way in your body:

• Stop the body from generating the hormone
• Block the hormone so that it doesn’t attach to the cancer cells
• Change the hormone, so it doesn’t work the way it is supposed to

Some hormone therapy is used with other cancer treatments; these are effective in:

• Neoadjuvant Therapy: Reducing a tumor’s size before surgery or radiation.
• Adjuvant Therapy: Reduces the possibility of cancer returning after primary chemotherapy.
• Ensure that cancer cells that have returned or spread elsewhere are destroyed.

• Oral drugs: The majority of hormone therapies are administered orally. Just like other medications, these pills, capsules, or liquids are swallowed. These are usually taken at home.
• Injectable drugs: Hormone therapy can be given as injections in the arm, leg, or hip. This procedure is known as intramuscular injections (IM). Another type is given just under the belly skin (belly). Drugs and types of cancer being treated determine how often they are given.
• Hormone-producing organs are removed by surgery: It is also possible for some types of surgery to be hormone therapies. For example, an orchiectomy (surgery in which testicles, the body’s primary source of testosterone, is removed) can be helpful for some men who need hormone therapy for prostate cancer. Likewise, an oophorectomy (surgery in which ovaries, the body’s primary source of estrogen and retinol, are removed) may be considered by some women with breast cancer.

These molecule-deliver molecules deliver drugs directly into or onto cancer cells to damage them.

These disrupt normal cell functions, so the cancer cells die.

These disrupt cell signals so that they change the actions of the cancer cell.