Treatments
Eye Cancer Treatments
Depending on your specific condition, your treatment for eye cancer may include a single treatment or a combination of therapies such as:
- Chemotherapy: This is the use of specific medicines to treat cancer. Chemotherapy types are:
- Intraocular: Medicine is injected directly into the eye. This allows higher doses without affecting the rest of the body.
- Systemic: Chemotherapy medicine is injected into a vein or taken as a pill. It spreads throughout the body. Systemic chemotherapy treats cancer that may have spread to other parts of the body.
- Laser therapy: Lasers (highly-focused light beams) can destroy cancer cells. Laser therapy may be used to treat intraocular melanoma, but not intraocular lymphoma.
- Proton therapy: A type of radiation therapy, proton therapy uses protons (heavy, positively-charged atomic particles) instead of the standard X-rays, which results in fewer negative side effects. Patients treated with protons usually retain useful vision in the treated eye.1
- Radiation therapy: High-energy X-rays kill cancer cells. Radiation therapy may be delivered by external beam or in the form of small pellet injected directly into the affected area. This type is called brachytherapy.
- Surgery: Used less often as radiation therapy use has grown, surgery treats some intraocular melanomas but not intraocular lymphoma. Types of surgery include:
- Iridectomy: A procedure to remove of part of the iris.
- Iridocyclectomy: This procedure removes of part of the iris and ciliary body.
- Sclerouvectomy/endoresection: This procedure removes the choroidal tumor while keeping the eye.
- Enucleation: This procedure removes the entire eye.
- Targeted therapy: This treatment uses special medicines that attack specific parts of the cancer cells to kill them.
