from the BBC: scary news that chemo kills more brain cells than cancer cells!

[Lolly]

Just an encouraging word to those who have had chemo more recently than me...
There are now many days when I feel my memory is better than "BC"(before chemo ).
My husband, who is older than I am, sometimes has to ask ME to help him remember things! So yes, the brain does repair and compensate for damaged areas. Just takes time, and as R.B. keeps reminding us, consumption of "the right stuff ".

<3 Lolly

[Lani]

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.

[Lani]

1: J Natl Cancer Inst. 2006 Dec 6;98(23):1742-5. Links
Change in cognitive function after chemotherapy: a prospective longitudinal study in breast cancer patients.

Schagen SB,
Muller MJ,
Boogerd W,
Mellenbergh GJ,
van Dam FS.
Department of Psychosocial Research and Epidemiology, Netherlands Cancer Institute-Antoni van Leeuwenhoek Hospital, Plesmanlaan121, 1066 CX Amsterdam, The Netherlands. s.schagen@nki.nl.
Some breast cancer survivors experience cognitive decline following chemotherapy. We prospectively examined changes in cognitive performance among high-risk breast cancer patients who had received high-dose chemotherapy with cyclophosphamide, thiotepa, and carboplatin (CTC group; n = 28) or standard-dose chemotherapy with 5-fluorouracil, epirubicin, and cyclophosphamide (FEC group; n = 39); stage-I breast cancer patients who had received no systemic chemotherapy (no-CT group; n = 57); and healthy control subjects (n = 60). All patients underwent neuropsychologic testing before and 6 months after treatment (12-month interval); control subjects underwent repeated testing over a 6-month interval. No differences in cognitive functioning between the four groups were observed at the first assessment. More of the CTC group than the control subjects experienced a deterioration in cognitive performance over time (25% versus 6.7%; odds ratio [OR] = 5.3, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.3 to 21.2, P = .02). No such difference was observed for the FEC or the no-CT groups (FEC versus control: OR = 2.2, 95% CI = 0.5 to 9.1, P = .27; no-CT versus Control: OR = 2.2, 95% CI = 0.6 to 8.0; P = .21). Some cytotoxic treatment for breast cancer affects cognition in a subset of women.
PMID: 17148777 [PubMed - in process]

[AlaskaAngel]

I too find this topic very worthwhile.

I will post a link to an interpreted version of Lani's last post (for those of us who have been through chemotherapy and perhaps suffer from some of the less than desirable consequences....)

http://www.medicineonline.com/news/1...e-decline.html