Every treatment process is different. Your care team may use a combination of different techniques to treat schwannomas.
At the UK HealthCare Comprehensive Spine Center, our team of experts works together to create the treatment plan that best fits your specific needs.
You will need regular imaging to monitor your tumor, but you may not need other treatment unless or until it starts growing larger.
The type of tumor removal surgery you need will vary depending on the size of the tumor, the type of cancer, where it is located, and how far it has spread. You will likely need to spend several days in the hospital after surgery and may need physical therapy to help you recover.
Chemotherapy uses special drugs to destroy cancer cells. You may need chemotherapy to shrink a tumor prior to surgery. Or you may need it after surgery to attack cancer cells that remain in your body.
In most cases, chemotherapy is an outpatient IV infusion treatment performed in an infusion suite or clinic. Patients typically receive chemotherapy infusions for a few hours, for several weeks in a row. You may also be prescribed oral chemotherapy that you take at home.
Most patients may need a combination of drugs or multiple rounds of chemotherapy.
Radiation therapy is a form of cancer treatment that uses high doses of targeted energy to kill cancer cells. You may need radiation before or after surgery.
There are three types of radiation therapy:
- External beam radiation is performed by directing the targeted energy to the tumor in the body from a machine outside the body. Most people receive external beam radiation for weeks at a time.
- Internal radiation, also called brachytherapy, is performed by placing a radioactive source near the tumor within the body. Brachytherapy can be removed after a period of time or left inside the body until it is no longer radioactive.
- Systemic radiation is performed by having patients either take a liquid medicine by mouth or delivered through a vein. Systemic radiation travels throughout the entire body, but the medicines will collect in areas where cancer is present.
This outpatient treatment usually lasts for a short time. However, you will need radiation almost every day for several weeks in a row.
Targeted therapy, or precision medicine, uses drugs to talk to certain proteins or genes in cancer cells and tell them to stop reproducing. Targeted therapy may be given via outpatient infusion, or it may be a medicine that you take at home. You may be on and off a targeted therapy for days, weeks, months or longer.