Dear Cathy,
My wife, Evelyn, has been on Herceptin and Xeloda from April 2004.
For her palliative treatment, she was given the choice to either start with Xeloda or Herceptin alone. Or to take the combination. She choose for the combination that time. It worked very well for her. The swelling of her arm and the skinrash faded already after 1 or 2 cycles.
Xeloda does its work inside the cell, while Herceptin has its effect on the cell-surface (HER2/neu)
The onc. started Xeloda with a standard dose, based on your length and body weight. For Evelyn (1.56m, 54kg) that came down to 1800mg twice daily. (So, 3600mg/day). Xeloda comes in pills of either 500 or 150mg.
With each (three weekly) visit to the onc. there will be an evaluation on how you doing. If you have any adverse effect, etc.
With this standard dosage (1800mg twice a day), Evelyn experienced some diarrhoea and her hands/feet were getting dry.
Based on this, the dosage Xeloda was brought back to 1500mg, and later to 1350mg. (This she could tolerate very well)
As for the hand/foot reaction (which is most common side effect), take care of your hands and feet already when you start Xeloda.
Rub your hands and feet with e.g. pure white vaseline and before you go to sleep rub your feet again and wear cottonwool soks.
With Evelyn this was working very well.
To my opinion this combination (Herceptin & Xeloda) is a good and well-tolerable treatment.
Hope this have aswered some questions for you. Don't hesitate to ask if you have more.
Good luck to you, Cathy.
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