Skipping Chemo Could Be in the Future for Some

category: Dafé’s Café - Daily Dose of Medical News, MyDocHub
by Dafé,

Some may be able to avoid the hard side effects of that staple of cancer care:

Chemotherapy

Avoiding chemotherapy is something most cancer patients, especially women will like to avoid. No cancer patient looks forward to the nausea, hair loss and weakened immune system that are the hallmarks of chemotherapy. Doctors at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting said they are closer to predicting which cancer patients can skip chemotherapy, and forego the side effects. Dr Aron Goldhirsch, of the Oncology Institute of Southern Switzerland, said: “Chemotherapy is clearly effective for patients - on average. But can it be spared?”

This is especially good news for women patients with high levels of estrogen receptors - cancer cells containing special proteins that bind to the hormone estrogen, because they are among the patient subsets that may not benefit from chemotherapy for breast cancer. Dr Kathy Albain, director of the breast clinical research program at Loyola University Medical Center in Illinois said such innovations are coming in a few years, and according to her, “we have entered the tailored therapy era.” While breast cancer is in the forefront in this area, lung cancer lung cancer which is the leading cause of cancer deaths in the world is also been looked at.

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2 Comments so far

Increased Success Rate for Chemotherapy in Breast Cancer at MyDocHub Blog | 14 March 2008, 07:12
[...] this that we are doing this research. We are trying to identify groups of patients who need lighter chemotherapy or shorter treatment. We are trying to develop tailor-made treatment and this study is a good [...]
Chemo Drug Could Cause Serious Brain Damage at MyDocHub Blog | 23 April 2008, 11:34
[...] and dementia. I don’t want to have a “chemo brain,” and so would you, if you had to take chemotherapy for your cancer [...]