HER2 Support Group Forums - View Single Post - from the BBC: scary news that chemo kills more brain cells than cancer cells!

Lani · 12-01-2006, 06:01 AM

for those of you who do not post--that is the gremlins who restrict what you post to 2500 characters--is to try to get all the relevant information to you

Busy people often try to read just the first and last line...they would miss

The Rochester team carried out tests with three drugs used to treat a wide range of cancers: carmustine, cisplatin and cytosine arabinoside.

This article related to the risk/benefit of chemo as treatment for all cancers. In the case of EACH cancer the benefit of chemo is different

ie, for hormonally responsive breast cancer it is less than for ER- breast cancer, for her2+topo2+ breast cancer it appears to be greater than for her2-topo2-ER+ breast cancer...hence the opining by Drs. Slamon and Pegram that the OncoDx does not do much more than a good ERstatus, PRstatus, and her2status in dissecting out who benefits from chemo--
this will change as we learn even more ways to dissect out the groups which benefit from chemo

of course for testicular cancer, like Lance Armstrong had, chemo is curative and overwhelmingly successful so the pendulum is obviously in the other court.

This article should not stop people from utilizing chemo, but I hope it makes oncologists think of performing whatever tests are possible to determine as best as possible the patients' likelihood of benefit from chemo before recommending it, and get researchers and government grant-givers to work even harder to get gene expression profiling and other testing from the "bench to the clinic" as soon as possible.

There are huge costs to society as well as individual suffering from giving chemo to 100 patients for 8-15 to benefit, which from my reading is often what they use as a criteria to recommend a treatment!!!

I hope it will also encourage insurance companies to pay for nonchemo
targeted treatments like herceptin(although many on this board think Hercetin has problems of its own--perhaps those are late problems from the chemo or the result of a "one=two punch" from chemo plus herceptin)

I hope it will STOP for once and for all the oncologists pronouncement that
"chemobrain" is just the manifestation of depression and sleeplessness.

12-01-2006, 06:01 AM	#14
Lani Senior Member Join Date: Mar 2006 Posts: 4,778	The reason I struggle to put up with the "2500 character" police for those of you who do not post--that is the gremlins who restrict what you post to 2500 characters--is to try to get all the relevant information to you Busy people often try to read just the first and last line...they would miss The Rochester team carried out tests with three drugs used to treat a wide range of cancers: carmustine, cisplatin and cytosine arabinoside. This article related to the risk/benefit of chemo as treatment for all cancers. In the case of EACH cancer the benefit of chemo is different ie, for hormonally responsive breast cancer it is less than for ER- breast cancer, for her2+topo2+ breast cancer it appears to be greater than for her2-topo2-ER+ breast cancer...hence the opining by Drs. Slamon and Pegram that the OncoDx does not do much more than a good ERstatus, PRstatus, and her2status in dissecting out who benefits from chemo-- this will change as we learn even more ways to dissect out the groups which benefit from chemo of course for testicular cancer, like Lance Armstrong had, chemo is curative and overwhelmingly successful so the pendulum is obviously in the other court. This article should not stop people from utilizing chemo, but I hope it makes oncologists think of performing whatever tests are possible to determine as best as possible the patients' likelihood of benefit from chemo before recommending it, and get researchers and government grant-givers to work even harder to get gene expression profiling and other testing from the "bench to the clinic" as soon as possible. There are huge costs to society as well as individual suffering from giving chemo to 100 patients for 8-15 to benefit, which from my reading is often what they use as a criteria to recommend a treatment!!! I hope it will also encourage insurance companies to pay for nonchemo targeted treatments like herceptin(although many on this board think Hercetin has problems of its own--perhaps those are late problems from the chemo or the result of a "one=two punch" from chemo plus herceptin) I hope it will STOP for once and for all the oncologists pronouncement that "chemobrain" is just the manifestation of depression and sleeplessness.