Living with Side Effects of Treatment
Newer treatments are helping people with cancer live longer, but the treatments themselves have consequences. One example is what we call "chemobrain."Julia H. Rowland, Ph.D.
Director, Office of Cancer Survivorship, NCI
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This a disease that you cure, is it a disease that you control, is it a disease that you are ultimately going to die with or from? And I think the answer is yes to all of these. As we push the science out, we're going to have more people whom we can actually cure, so they will have had the disease, we treat the disease and they live the rest of their lives with no evidence of the cancer coming back. But I think what you would learn very quickly, if you talk to someone who has a history of cancer, is that being cancer-free does not mean being free of cancer. None of our current therapies are benign or without side effects. Some of them have very minor side effects, but more of them have moderate side effects and some potentially devastating, life threatening side effects. For example, some of our chemotherapeutic agents, which are very effective in controlling the disease, come with the risk of increasing the chance for an individual to have a second cancer later or life threatening cardiotoxic events later. So it's something which we're increasingly mindful of as we look at that growing population of survivors.
Examples of research in that area would be looking at the phenomenon of what many patients describe as; survivors describe as "chemobrain". That clouded fuzzy thinking process that occurs after someone has undergone chemotherapy. They can't remember things, they can't organize themselves in the same way and scientists have begun to look at this and say, actually theses reports are very real and there may be damage that is associated with exposure to some of these chemotherapeutic agents. Some people may be more vulnerable than others, so a couple of our grants are looking at: are there genetic pre-dispositions, are there characterologic. And another set of grants are looking at: are there interventions that we can introduce; memory techniques, some drugs for children? Use of methylphenidate or Ritalin may help some of these learning disabilities or cognitive problems that people have with chemotherapy. Because we know we need to use these agents to control the disease, but can we minimize their adverse effect?