Can chemotherapy cure small cell lung cancer? Short-term cure, easy to relapse

Small cell lung cancer is a disease that can be effectively alleviated or temporarily cured with the help of chemotherapy, but it is prone to relapse and requires continued treatment. After the treatment, the disease will relapse again. This cycle of torment will cause the patient's body to no longer be able to tolerate the side effects of chemotherapy.

In real life, lung cancer is a relatively common disease. It is closely related to the bad habit of long-term and heavy smoking in some patients, which brings serious mental distress to patients. It must be treated early. Among the many types of lung cancer, small cell lung cancer is one of them. So, can chemotherapy cure small cell lung cancer? Let us find out below!
Small cell lung cancer is considered the most dangerous type of lung cancer. However, although small cell lung cancer is very dangerous and progresses very quickly, at the same time, small cell lung cancer is often very sensitive to chemotherapy.
Generally speaking, after 2 to 3 months of chemotherapy, the malignant tumors formed by small cell lung cancer can basically disappear in the body. However, this does not mean that the cancer has been completely cured.
The reason is that small cell lung cancer is a disease that is prone to recurrence. Therefore, in the process of treating small cell lung cancer, there is usually radiotherapy and chemotherapy, and then the cancer disappears, then recurs, and then radiotherapy and chemotherapy are required again. This pathological process often runs through the entire disease of small cell lung cancer.
The constant consumption will cause the patient's body to become increasingly weak, and then he will not be able to tolerate further radiotherapy and chemotherapy, or the cancer cells will develop drug resistance, leading to the termination of treatment.
However, although small cell lung cancer is difficult to cure, chemotherapy is still the main treatment for small cell lung cancer. The effect of chemotherapy generally occurs within 12 weeks after the start of treatment, and it is difficult to see further increase in the effect after that.
As mentioned above, because chemotherapy alone will result in a very high recurrence rate, it is generally recommended that patients need to receive some radiotherapy treatment of the primary thoracic lesion during chemotherapy, so as to increase the chances of local control of the patient's intrathoracic tumor.