Peritoneal Carcinomatosis: Drugs and Diseases

The pharmacology that has been observed with the intraperitoneal administration of chemotherapy has generated considerable interest. The pharmacology of the drugs most likely to be employed as agents for intraperitoneal chemotherapy are presented in this book. Progress in peritoneal carcinomatosis has been slow in the past because clinicians attempted to accomplish the impossible. Advanced disease was treated with intraperitoneal chemotherapy or immunotherapy. Heterogeneous responses were seen, but complete eradication of disease was impossible. No treatments described to date can penetrate deeply enough into established tumour modules to confer lasting benefit. To make matters worse, the chemotherapy was almost always used in an abdomen or pelvis that had been treated by prior surgery. Scar tissue makes uniform distribution of chemotherapy impossible. These two conditions meant that patients showed little long-term benefit. This volume aims to stimulate work in this field, conferring benefits in terms of quality of life and survival on cancer patients.