All Chemotherapy Drugs & Their Side Effects

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Dr. David Cathcart. I'm a family practice physician from Heartland Regional Medical Center in St. Joseph, and we're going to talk about chemotherapy drugs, and their side effects today. Chemotherapy drugs come in all different kinds of classes. The ones that we've been talking about most in this series are those drugs that effect the division of cells. Chemotherapy drugs are medications that are used to interrupt the rapid growth of cancerous cells. There's a whole, wide variety of these medications that are on the market. One of them, is one called alkylating agents. And essentially what they do is they interfere, or kill the cells DNA. Which is the genes, or the genetic portion of that cell, that keeps it from replicating. Another class of drugs which is called platnin drugs, which is often times actually classified with the alkylating agents, does similar sort of thing. One of the common drugs there is called cisplatnin that's in the alkylating agents. There's also antimetabolites. Antimetabolites are drugs that interfere with the replication of DNA, and RNA, and an example of that drug would be 5-fluorouracil. Another class of drugs is one called antimetabolites, and again these also interfere with the mitotic division of cells by interfering with the genetic material, DNA, and RNA, and keeping those cells from replicating, kills them. Another type of, other types of agents are those that interfere with various enzymes in the cell. For example, a medication called Topotican, interferes with the cells ability to separate DNA. You know DNA is a double stranded molecule, that's part of our genes. And it has to be separated first so it can be copied, and then the copy makes a new cell. These agents that interfere with those enzymes, keep that process from happening. So there are a whole host of chemotherapeutic agents. And they each have their own specific side effects. But again, not everybody gets side effects. Hardly anybody gets all of the side effects. And most of these side effects can be treated just by discussing them with your doctor. He can help you with agents that would help suppress some of those side effects. This is Dr. Cathcart talking to you about the various types of chemotherapy agents, and their side effects."