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Asked by cupcake94 to Amar, Ana, Andrea, Leah, Matt on 10 Mar 2014. This question was also asked by .
Question: can you get worse of treatment for cancer????
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Matthew Lam answered on 10 Mar 2014:
Most of the drugs people get to treat their cancer have side-effects. For example, chemotherapy attacks all the fast growing cells in your body so is quite good at killing cancer cells. But this also means that chemotherapy kills cells that make up your hair and cells that make up your immune system. This is why people on chemotherapy tend to lose their hair, feel weak and are more likely to get bacterial or viral infections.
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Andrea Hanvey answered on 10 Mar 2014:
Quite often people do get very sick from cancer treatments.
My husband is just recovering from colon cancer. He had radiotherapy surgery and chemotherapy. The chemotherapy made him feel extremely tired and sick. The doctors gave him a lot of Medicean to help with the sickness. He also suffered from something called neuropathy, which is when the cancer drugs affect the nerve endings in and hands and feet and sometimes if affects your speech.
The effects of alot of chemo therapies like my husbands are cumulative this means they get worse as time goes on. He has finished his chemotherapy two weeks ago and is feeling better every day. He still has neuropathy in his feet which could be permanent.
I spoke to a lot of other cancer patients whilst my husband was having treatment and the treatments effect people in differ ways.
From a scientific point of view chemotherapy drugs doesn’t just target cancer cells. They kill cells dividing in the body. So cells that are replaced in the body often are often dividing. Cells like the lining of the guts, skin, hair follicles, blood cells. So these when these no cancer cells are killed off they cause side effects.
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Amar Joshi answered on 10 Mar 2014:
Matthew and Andrea’s answers are great! The main downside to chemo are the side effects but new more targetted drugs – like the work that I am doing – hope to remove those side effects.
The side effects of surgery are usually just short term and due to the proceedure. However, like all surgery there are possibilities of complications. One other cancer treatment is radiotherapy – using radiation to kill cancer cells by breaking up the DNA. Radiotherapy itself can have side effects – sickness and sores.
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Leah Fitzsimmons answered on 10 Mar 2014:
The others are right, most of the chemotherapy drugs that we use at the moment target fast growing cells, which means they can kill healthy cells as well as cancerous ones. However, there is lots of research going on to find drugs that will only kill the cancer cells and not harm healthy ones. To do this we need to find molecules that exist only in cancer cells but not healthy ones, so that we can then design drugs to target those molecules. This is quite difficult; researchers have found lots of targets, but sometimes they are difficult to design drugs for, or they only find the target in a small number of people, which means you have to test every patient before you know which drug might help them.
Although finding new drugs is slow, more possible targets and more drugs are being found all the time and many cancer patients in the UK will have their cells checked to see whether they will respond to the new drugs which should have far fewer and less unpleasant side effects.
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Anastasia Wass answered on 17 Mar 2014:
The others are right, cancer treatments often have side effects but treatments are always being made more specific to try and reduce these. A lot of side effects are short term as well so even though they make you feel ill once the cancers gone you feel better.
Comments
cupcake94 commented on :
thank you